Last year was a big one for Toyota: The Japanese auto giant moved its North American headquarters from Southern California -- where they had been since Toyota started importing cars to the U.S. in the middle of last century -- to Plano.

The company also announced plans upgrade its biggest factory, in Kentucky, to the tune of $1.3 billion, build a whole new plant near Huntsville, Ala. as part of a joint venture with Mazda and ramped up its data "startup," as the carmaker grapples with a rapidly shifting market.

The Dallas Morning News talked with Jim Lentz, Toyota's North American CEO, on Tuesday during the Detroit Auto Show about the year ahead. Here's what he had to say.

Toyota CEO Jim Lentz talks with the media at the grand opening of the Toyota headquarters in Plano, Texas, photographed on Thursday, July 6, 2017. (Louis DeLuca / Staff Photographer)

On hiring up after the big move:

When Toyota announced plans to relocate its North American headquarters, company officials were optimistic that it could convince thousands of its California employees to make the move to the Lone Star State.

Lentz said this week that he didn’t know exactly how many moved from California, versus Kentucky or New York, but of about 4,200 employees nationwide who were asked, he said, 2,800 agreed. The vast majority are now hard at work in the company’s massive new campus.

That left about 1,400 to be hired, he said. Roughly 400 came from within Toyota's operations elsewhere. Which left 1,000 open jobs. And if you think finding 1,000 qualified workers in a region that's adding jobs faster than anywhere else in the country in a period of record low unemployment, well, you are wrong.

“When I was running the sales organization, if we hired 50 people in a year, that was a lot,” Lentz said. “It was a daunting task.”

At its peak, the company had about 55 people -- some of whom were contractors brought in especially to help with recruitment -- sifting through a total of 100,000 applications, which rolled in over the past two years.

Lentz said about “90 percent” of the new hires came from North Texas.

“The reception to Toyota in the community has been absolutely overwhelming,” he said. All but just a handful of the jobs have been filled.

On what those recruiters were looking for:

Lentz said that, above all, he wanted the new hires to fit in with the company’s “fairly dominant culture,” where teamwork, respect and a desire to continue learning are at the heart of a company where people build lifelong careers.

“I can teach people the car business,” he said. “What I can’t teach is people to have that same philosophy at the core.”

That being said, more practical concerns made recruiting difficult for one specific department: IT.

“I think the biggest competition in the marketplace right now is in IT,” he said. “If you go back 15 years, the trend in the IT world was to outsource all of your support ... today companies are developing platforms -- that’s a core competency that needs to rest in the company.”

As a result, more large companies that have previously sent their IT operations overseas or to other remote sites are “insourcing” -- or hiring their own programmers and tech workers as full time staff members.

“That’s putting a lot of pressure on the overall market,” Lentz said.

Check back soon for more from our conversation with Toyota's Jim Lentz, and read all of the News' Toyota coverage here.