Imagine you have to watch The Hobbit, The Avengers and Inception for your next job application. That´s what LA-based producer Josh Garrell had to do when he applied for a job at Netflix.

Josh works as a "tagger", responsible for giving on-demand movies the right keywords. Frankly, I´ve actually never heard of this profession before.

"You're really breaking down parts of a movie or TV show that you wouldn't think to break down," says Josh, who has been tagging since 2012. "Netflix built an incredibly detailed, multi-page set-up for us to be able to input a gargantuan amount of information."

These tag descriptors are then put to work with a series of algorithms, forming Netflix's complex search and recommendations engine. In layman's terms this is how the entertainment streaming site guesses that you might like Eat Pray Love, based on the fact that you watched Pretty Woman (though let's face it, you shouldn't be watching either).

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"I originally applied for another job at Netflix - but didn't get it. A friend of mine works at Netflix and I interviewed for a job with one of the higher ups there. I wasn't qualified enough for the job I was applying for but Netflix really liked me during the interview, so they called me up later and asked if I was interested in interviewing for tagging."

"I watched The Hobbit, The Avengers and Inception for my Netflix job application. I had to take five movies I'd already watched and create fake tags for them, then Netflix checked whether or not they were accurate against tags that someone else had done."

"Jennifer Lawrence in X-Men: Days of Future Past is 'haunted' and 'angry'. If I'm describing a character from a movie I have a tonne of options to choose from, which is also true for when I'm describing the movie itself. You just try to narrow it down to the tags that best describe that character, so they end up not being a mish-mash of too many things."

"The key is really being able to show an understanding of TV and film. I think that's most important - there were a lot of people who were recruited with a very specific skill, like speaking multiple languages, but who hadn't watched a tonne of TV and movies so they had to have more training. It's really about being able to have that intrinsic knowledge, having watched a bunch of stuff and understanding how it works."

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"Documentaries are the hidden gems of Netflix - they often get overlooked but the ones that I've tagged have been phenomenal. There's this amazing one about how the human personality is formed [The Lottery of Birth] which shows that the only way to unlearn hatred, small-mindedness or bigotry is to start over how we're thinking and look carefully at what were instilling in children when they're born."

"I try to make it as fun as possible for myself. Sometimes I'll crack open a beer. Or I have a bit of a sweet tooth so I'll have chocolates and cookies or something like that. I have a projector and a screen so it makes it feel like I've got a little movie theatre at home."

"It's up there with driving an ice-cream truck. It's one of the best jobs I've ever had. If anything, the only thing that sucks about it is that I don't have more work. Even if I'm not tagging stuff I'm watching Orange Is The New Black or I'm going to the theatre - I don't stop ingesting. I love watching movies so this is like the coolest thing that I could ever imagine having."

Image credit: The boy watching TV via USC News.