The position description says the role will “deliver a predefined operational improvement roadmap.” Predefined. Rebecca and David have already decided what needs doing. They are hiring someone to carry it, not to redesign it.
Ask to be walked through the roadmap as it stands, and which part of it worries them most. Then show them you would deliver it without losing what made it right.
They want different things from you, and the answer that satisfies one can bore the other. Knowing which question you are being asked at any moment is most of the skill tomorrow.
The incumbent, going on maternity leave. Her background is production, not systems: Producer at WOW Pictures across fashion, corporate and food, and Content Producer at Daylesford Macedon Tourism before that.
She is Global Image Manager. The stills library is very likely the one that got properly structured, and video is the side that grew faster than anyone could organise it. That would explain why this role is scoped to video only.
So the generous question, and a genuinely useful one, is: “How much of what already works on the image side can carry across to video, and where does it break down?” It treats her existing work as the model rather than the problem.
The hiring manager, and the person you would report to. Irish, History degree from Trinity, came into Intrepid from freelance, with a background across content management, online journalism, social and television. He leads global brand production.
David’s team produced “Only Intrepid”, their largest brand campaign ever: close to 1,000 creative assets, a reported AU$5 million+ initial investment, built with Melbourne studio SouthSouthWest, running across digital, social, email, out-of-home, cinema, TV, print, podcasts and radio, with outdoor in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, London, Toronto and New York.
One campaign, a thousand assets. That is the number that turns a video library from a folder problem into a findability problem, and it came out of his department.
Charlotte Day, Recruitment Partner APAC, or Andrew, will collect you from the Level 7 lobby. Charlotte has been warm and quick with you throughout, so say hello properly if you see her.
The PD lists five areas with a benchmark measure attached to each. This is effectively your twelve-month scorecard, written down in advance. Being able to name all five unprompted is the single clearest signal that you read it properly.
Audit the iconik library. Design an improved folder structure and asset hierarchy. Define metadata, taxonomy and tagging specifications. Establish governance documentation for future uploads. Improve searchability and self-service.
Identify and translate business requirements into workflow or system improvements. Partner with post-production and creative stakeholders. Communicate progress, options and recommendations.
Improve post-production workflows including editing and proxy workflows. Standardise production handover. Improve collaboration between the editing team and wider stakeholders.
Review video software and subscriptions. Assess duplication. Recommend consolidation. Identify automation or AI-assisted tagging opportunities. Champion continuous improvement.
SOPs for post-production and DAM processes. Quick Start Guides and training documentation. Workflow charts. Governance, metadata and asset backup and retention standards. FAQ and knowledge base content.
“Predefined operational improvement roadmap.” The plan exists. Ask about it rather than replacing it.
“Rather than hands-on post-production execution.” You are not being hired to edit. Your shooting and editing is context that makes you credible, and it is not the job. Mention it once, then stay in operations.
“Project management systems such as Asana.” Named explicitly in the essentials. If you have used it, say so plainly. If not, say which you have used and move on.
You do not need all of this. You need two or three pieces used at the right moment, because specificity is what separates someone who has run a DAM from someone who has read about one.
“Are you on the AI Discovery rollout yet, or still on the older transcription and object detection?”
Almost nobody will ask that. It also quietly says something true and generous: before building anything custom, check whether the platform has already shipped it. At Quad Lock you built the human-in-the-loop review console by hand. Backlight is now shipping that pattern natively.
Facets, not folders. A clip of a cooking class in Hanoi is Vietnam, and food, and small group, and a specific trip code, and 2026 campaign, all at once. A folder makes you pick one home for it. Faceted metadata lets it live in all of them, and iconik supports unlimited custom fields grouped into views for exactly this.
Folder structure still matters for ingest discipline and permissions. It stops being the way people find things.
Multimodal video embeddings are the thing that finally makes untagged footage searchable by meaning, indexing visual, audio, spoken word and on-screen text together rather than in separate pipelines. Four days ago TwelveLabs’ Marengo model became the first video model available in Amazon Bedrock’s managed knowledge base.
Mention it as a direction, not a proposal. “That is where this is going, but I would not touch it in year one. You cannot put semantic search on top of a library you have not audited yet, and the taxonomy work still has to happen first.”
Knowing when not to use the shiny thing is the senior signal here.
Take a minute with this before you go in. The intimidation you felt about the number came from the salary, not from the work, and the work is work you have done.
“I did this in the order your roadmap describes, except I did the manual half first. Hand-tagging half a million assets is what taught me which metadata schema was worth building, and I do not think I would have got the schema right without it.”
That is a better answer than any credential, because it explains why your judgement is trustworthy rather than asserting that it is.
Charlotte wrote it out: they will dive deeper into your experience, how your skills and values align, “how you’ve approached challenges in your career, the skills you can bring to this role, and what excites you about this opportunity.” That is a behavioural interview. Have four stories ready, not four speeches.
Chronological and concrete, because the order is the proof. Hand-tagging, then the schema, then the AI layer, then the accuracy gate, then Slack search, then runbooks. Keep it to ninety seconds and let them pull on whichever thread interests them.
Their pack says they look for people who “stay genuine when things get challenging”, so the point of this answer is temperament, not triumph. The Aluvers shoot works well: the components delivery got missed, you spotted mid-shoot that the film had a hole where the product introduction should sit, and you staged one shot the next morning to patch it. Small, real, and it shows you were editing in your head while still shooting.
This is the question underneath the whole role, because “governance documentation adopted by team” is a literal benchmark measure. The honest answer is the Slack tool.
Lead with the roadmap, not with your own plan. This is where most candidates will overreach.
Strong ground for you. Rights have to travel with the asset as structured fields rather than a PDF in a folder: channels, territory, term, editing rights, ownership, expiry. And it connects directly to the retention standards in pillar 5.
Keep it short and make one of the two reasons about them rather than about the work. The climate decision is still your strongest, and you have standing on it through Climate Fresk. Then the honest one: this is the first ad you have seen that wants both halves of what you do.
Pick one, evidence it, stop. Reciting all four is the answer everyone gives. Real is the one you can actually evidence, because you name what you cannot do rather than overselling, and you have put honest gaps in writing on applications.
$90,000 to $98,000, said plainly. The ad’s ceiling is $98,000 and Melbourne medians for comparable scope sit slightly above it. Give the range, stop talking, let the silence sit.
She wrote it in the invitation, and their candidate pack says the same thing. With the incumbent in the room, your questions are worth more than your answers, because they are the only part of the hour where they see how you would actually start.
The PD mentions a predefined improvement roadmap. Could you walk me through where that has landed, and which part of it worries you most?
It shows you read the document properly, it hands them the floor on work they are proud of, and their answer tells you what the job really is for the rest of the conversation.
The roadmap question, one for Rebecca, one for David, one human. Listen to the answers rather than working down the list. Let one turn into a proper back and forth, because that is the bit they will remember.
You told Cam you were thinking of building deployed mini-sites showing new workflows, audits, documentation and automations for Intrepid. The instinct is right. I think the timing is wrong, and I want to be straight with you about why.
Bring proof of what you have already built, not a plan for what they should build.
A short case study of the Quad Lock system, mapped against their five accountabilities. It is unfalsifiable, it cannot land as criticism, and it answers the only real question they have about you: has this person done it before.
Offer it rather than present it. “I put together a short thing on how the Quad Lock build maps to your five areas, if that is useful. Happy to send it after.” Then let them ask.
Their process runs at least two interviews. Round two is where a deployed prototype becomes extraordinary, because by then you will have heard the roadmap and can build against what they actually said rather than what you guessed.
Same effort, a fraction of the risk, and ten times the accuracy. If you get through tomorrow, we build it properly with real information.
He said he would come back to you. If he replies before tomorrow morning, his read beats mine on anything about how you actually worked, because he watched you do it. Send me whatever he says and I will fold it in.
In 1988 two Australian university friends, Darrell Wade and Geoff “Manch” Manchester, drove a second-hand truck from London to Nairobi over nine months with twelve other people. They came back convinced there was a better way to travel than a coach and a hotel.
Their first trip, in 1989, was Thailand with five travellers and one tour leader: Geoff himself. It is now the largest adventure travel company in the world. Both founders are still on the board, Darrell as Chair.
A second-hand truck and five customers is a real starting line, and you have your own version of it. You started a studio from nothing in 2023. You do not need to labour the parallel, but it is honest, and it is a warmer answer to “why us” than admiring their size.
Almost every candidate will name one good thing Intrepid did. The stronger move is to name the pattern, because it shows you looked at more than one page.
Intrepid repeatedly gives up something valuable to do the right thing, before anyone makes them.
Giving up a marketing claim is harder than earning one. That is the sentence.
You facilitated Climate Fresk workshops for two years, walking groups through exactly the gap between offsetting and reducing. So you know how easy the other choice would have been. You have earned an opinion here rather than borrowed one, and that difference is audible.
A hundred new trips across fifty countries is an enormous amount of new footage arriving at once, from country offices all over the world, in every format and naming convention imaginable. That is precisely the problem this role exists to solve, and it is happening right now rather than hypothetically.
Saying that out loud shows you understand why they are hiring, which is a different thing from understanding the job description.
Curious first, competent second, warm throughout. The competence is already established or you would not be in the building. The curiosity is what makes someone want to hand you their work.
Short note to Charlotte.Day@intrepidtravel.com that afternoon. Three lines, one specific thing from the conversation, no pitch. Name Rebecca and David, because that is the part that gets passed on.
You shot with Pluto this morning on a Netflix comedy, you have a partner you are happy with, and it is spring. You are walking in from a good place rather than a desperate one, and that is audible in a room. Let it be.