Gaiam interview questions

Fairly detailed and rigorous. Made more difficult by poor communication and logistics by HR department, it took over 4 weeks to organize one onsite interview with 4 people; the actual interviewers asked tough questions and knew what they were speaking about, even if it wasn't "down in the weeds" questions.

After a phone interview, I interviewed at the Boulder office. Without giving any previous warning, I had to interview with several of the department heads, who all seemed as if it had been suggested to them last minute (they hadn't read my resume, didn't know what to ask, etc.) There was a lot of disagreement between staff about exactly what roles they were looking for. The final stage was with the founder Jirka Rysavy. What a disappointment. He is described as a daily meditator, who lives with a simple rustic life, and has dedicated his life to re-staging the now-sold Gaiam as Gaia TV. I was eager to meet him, thank him, talk with him. He was combative from the very first moment he walked in, which I mistakenly thought was an interview technique. It's actually just him. He insulted TWO different employers on my resume ("Oh him! What a terrible job he did at such and such..."), completely throwing me off guard, because they were both wonderful past experiences for me. Then he launched into a many-minute monologue about how he doesn't believe in production value. As in, he believes videos should be made as cheaply as possible, and Hollywood has it all wrong. Obviously, this was awkward for many reasons, but namely because I was interviewing for a position that needed to respect production value because, what else were we doing there? If you don't want high production value, don't hire producers. It's our craft. He continued to subtly and not-so-subtly insult me throughout the interview, barely smiled, interrupted me, and challenged everything I said. The impression I had the entire time was that he would be a NIGHTMARE to work for, because he would micromanage a subject (video creation) that he had absolutely no respect for. Finally, he went on for ages about how he really loves that fact that his core audience doesn't care about production value, but the content. I kept thinking: 'I doubt that. This is the age of MARVEL movies. Production value and content are not mutually exclusive. Your core audience is, unfortunately, very white and elitist who can afford to pay for content they want, but you're no Netflix or Amazon, and they know it.' After I left, I called a prestigious film producer friend who has done work with producers and companies for years that work with Gaia. He also knows the owner. He told me: "You dodged a bullet. They have the reputation of doing terrible work, and it's where projects go to die. No production value. Also, the owner is known for buying small companies under the premise of promoting all their good work in the world and spreading their projects widely, and then, they just SIT ON THE PROJECTS so that they have no competitors. It's a shark situation, and nothing good is coming out of there."