When most automakers are looking for opportunities to trim white collar staff, Nissan’s choice to move its headquarters from California to Tennessee is taking care of the problem for them.

Currently about 1,300 sales and marketing employees staff the California office, and so far 750 have told Nissan North America that they won’t be following the company to its new Nashville headquarters.

Of course, some re-staffing will be necessary, but the automaker will look for opportunities to continue cutting costs; the move in itself has been designed to integrate its headquarters and North American production facility. The Japanese automaker will re-staff its North American office and put California behind them.

“There are people we would’ve liked to have come with us,” commented Vice Chairman Jim Morton Jr, who has been one of the leaders behind the move to Nashville. “But we have now seen who will come and who won’t, and we’ll deal with it.”

Not all employees will be easy to replace, mind you, with some key executives also choosing to stay behind. Jack Collins, the brand’s long-time VP of product planning won’t be going to Tennessee, and neither will VP of sales and marketing Jed Connelly, who has been instrumental in driving Nissan’s recent growth in market share.

According to Morton, Nissan has already been taking steps to hire others to fill the shoes of those choosing to stay in California, either hiring or offering jobs to more than 200 people.

Interestingly, though, not all new employees are coming out of the Tennessee area, what the state had initially hoped would happen. Instead Nissan has been targeting the wealth of automotive experience in Detroit, a workforce that has been decimated in recent months and will continue to be trimmed according to plans by General Motors and Ford Motor Company, as well as other automakers which are streamlining operations.

Detroit isn’t the only recruiting center, mind you, as the brand is looking for help in more than ten major markets that have experienced auto workers, such as Atlanta, Georgia and Louisville, Kentucky. Now comes the challenge of sifting through the respondents to fill the 200 vacant positions, as no less than 27,000 resumes have resulted in the employee search.

At this point it is difficult to say whether or not Nissan will continue to hire over and above the above stated 200 vacancies, as there are 42 percent of the 750 Californian workers readying to move, or 315 staff members, leaving 235 positions in the air if the automaker has plans to fill each and every desk that was occupied in its California office.

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