Lululemon’s CEO Wanted Prank

If you’ve applied for a job in the last 5 years,  such as making a call in response to an ad or following a lead, you might have discovered that “a hundred people have applied to this ad today.” How discouraging to find that the office job that you have perfect qualifications for has over a hundred applicants! And when you ace their typing test, or whatever, and yet don’t even get a call back for a second interview, you have to ask yourself, “how were there people more qualified than me for that job?” If you are prankish, you might turn this into a trick: for example, you might make an ad for a “video game tester” and give your mother-in-law’s phone number for a contact or something similar.

Well Lululemon did a prank to remind people that they’ve “always been a fun and irreverent brand … not afraid to spark a conversation in our communities,” as spokeswoman Alecia Pulman says.

They put an ad for CEO a few days after CEO Christine Day stepped down. The new CEO should be fluent in Sanskrit, be able to headstand for ten minutes, and have Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey on speed dial. Whether anybody fits these qualifications is doubtable, but 160 responded nevertheless. And why not, the job description says, “You report to no one, you are the CEO (duh).” Well how nice! Unfortunately, nobody will get hired for the position.

It’s good that Lululemon can have a laugh though, considering their shares are down 3 percent since their sheer pants debacle (they made yoga pants that incidentally turned see through when you bend over); and down 19 percent since the CEO stepped down on Monday.

Meanwhile, the way we can apply to jobs we are very qualified for and hear nothing back makes us almost wonder whether we participated in some joke as well.