First things first: Goal-setting. If there's one thing you NEED TO KNOW about anything to do with Lululemon, it's this: SET GOALS. What those goals are doesn't really seem to matter, so long as they A- exist, B- are written down, and C- you can convince people that they are indeed legit goals and not just ones you've made up for your interview/the time you spend working at Lululemon. I actually didn't mind the goal-setting exercise. It was by far the best part of my experience with Lululemon. First point of contact was a job listing on their website. I applied online with the usual resume and cover letter, plus their goal-setting sheet. After that, I heard absolutely nothing for 2 months. Having nothing better to do one day, I emailed one of their recruiters directly and found out that he meant to talk to me but "was really really busy." This, it must be said, should have been a sign. After about a week of emails back and forth, we had a time set for a phone interview. The phone interview itself didn't seem particularly difficult or out of the ordinary. I answered a few questions, the recruiter said a few things, I answered a few more standard phone interview questions, and then I was told that there was a position that seemed to fit my profile and that I should interview in person. Great! Oh how wrong I was… Again, it took 3-4 weeks and tons of emails for this recruiter to get back to me. Keep in mind, I'd already been told that an interview was forthcoming. So after not hearing from them at all for another 2 weeks, I emailed Lululemon's head recruiter asking her if I had an interview or not. "Coincidentally," I had my original recruiter email me back less than 10 minutes after I had emailed his boss. A time for an interview was set immediately. Lululemon has nice looking, crisp, clean, contemporary headquarters. Lots of white, lots of light, and they're mere blocks away from Chip Wilson's new waterfront home on Point Grey Rd, which is convenient if you're a billionaire. I arrived early afternoon on a weekday and the place seemed dead. A very nice receptionist made sure I signed the "guestbook," and I was told to wait for the recruiter. He showed up, told me he couldn't stay for my interview but that I'd be speaking with my potential manager. Again, in hindsight, another hint that this wasn't going to go well. I've messed up a lot of interviews. I've been interviewed by a lot of people who had no idea what they were doing. But up until my interview at Lululemon, I'd never been interviewed by someone who was not only completely unprepared but hadn't been briefed by HR as to who I was and hadn't even had the chance to read through my resume. Needless to say, any interview that starts with a manager asking you for a couple of minutes so she can read through your resume isn't going to go well. And it didn't. It took her all of 30 seconds to dismiss me. What's going to kill Lululemon isn't the fact that Nike, Gap, Reebok and a billion other companies are all gunning for them. Their HR department and recruitment process will kill them. HQ jobs are well-known around Vancouver for being some of the few well-paying, "career" type jobs in the city. That's good. But my interview story is far from uncommon. The hell they put potential designers through should be illegal. While I could definitely use the money and career boost, I'm happy I didn't get an offer and happy I don't work at Lululemon. It saved me the trouble of having to turn them down.