What Agencies Actually Look For When Hiring Juniors.

Most advice about getting hired at an agency is written by people guessing. There is a better source: the job listings themselves. Ours are public — eight roles across Creative, Production, Strategy, Client Services, Growth and Operations, all on-site in Sheikh Zayed, Giza — and their requirements are unusually specific about what is being screened for.

What follows is those requirements read literally, because the specific sentences in a listing are the ones a hiring manager wrote after being disappointed. They are the test.

The four things that are actually being screened

1. Can you own an output end to end?

Our Reel Creator listing says it outright: "Must be able to edit and colour grade your own work — we need someone who owns the output end to end, not just one half of it." That sentence exists because half-ownership is the most common junior profile. Someone shoots but cannot cut. Someone designs but cannot export correctly. Someone writes but cannot read the performance data afterwards.

An agency runs several accounts in parallel, so every handover between two people is a delay. The candidate who closes the loop alone is worth more than the candidate who is slightly better at one half of it. If you are early in your career, this is the highest-leverage thing to fix: pick your output and learn the unglamorous end of it.

2. Can you move between different kinds of work?

The Graphic Designer requirement is explicit: experience across both branding and social media, "comfortable moving between building an identity system and producing a month of on-brand social content." Those are genuinely different disciplines — one is slow and systemic, the other is fast and high-volume — and a portfolio that only shows one is a portfolio that only covers half the week.

The same listing asks for "a portfolio that shows range, not one repeated style." This is the single most common reason a junior portfolio gets passed over. Twenty pieces in one aesthetic read as one piece. Six pieces across six problems read as a person who can be briefed.

3. Can you be put in front of a client?

Our Social Media Specialist listing asks for someone "confident handling clients directly: presenting a plan, taking feedback, and managing expectations without losing the work's quality." The Account Manager listing goes further: "you translate what a client actually needs into a brief the team can execute" and "you spot problems early instead of reporting them late."

That last line is a specific test, not a personality trait. Reporting a problem late is the default behaviour — it feels safer. Raising it early, while it is still small and still your fault, is the behaviour agencies pay for. In an interview you can demonstrate it with one story about something you raised before you had to.

4. Can you read numbers and change what you do?

Two of our listings require it directly: "comfortable reading performance data and acting on it" and reporting on "what worked, what didn't, and what changes next." Note the structure of that phrase. It has three parts, and candidates usually only prepare the first.

This is learnable without a job. Our benchmarks page publishes real cost-per-result figures from our own accounts — 1.74 EGP per lead in aesthetics, 10.66 EGP per qualified lead in real estate, 0.52 EGP per click on Google Search for a Gulf retailer. The useful exercise is not memorising them. It is being able to explain why the real-estate lead costing six times more than the aesthetics lead was the correct outcome: qualification filters raise cost and close rate at the same time. A junior who can make that argument is ahead of most seniors.

What the listings do not ask for

Read our eight roles together and the absences are as informative as the requirements.

• No university is named, in any of the eight.
• No certificate is named. Software appears, but as a capability to demonstrate — Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects — not as a badge.
• No years-of-experience inflation. The ceiling across all eight listings is "2+ years", and community moderation asks for "1+ years". These are open doors, not senior roles.
• Location is non-negotiable. Every one of the eight says the same thing: based in 6th of October, Sheikh Zayed or a surrounding area, on-site. Candidates routinely ignore this and are filtered on it.
• Arabic matters as much as English. Our Community Moderator role asks for "excellent written Arabic and good English", and the Social Media Specialist role requires strong copywriting in both. Strong Arabic writing is an underrated advantage in this market.

The easiest role to be underestimated in

Community Moderator is our only 1+ year role, and it is routinely treated as the least serious. Read what it actually asks: "you understand that the first reply is what closes, and that a warm lead goes cold in hours", and being "fast, calm and on-brand under pressure — including when a comment thread turns hostile."

That is a revenue job. Our published results show why: 594 orders for VapeTopia closed at 1.13 EGP per conversation, and 738 conversations for a single café. In this market a large share of buying happens in the inbox, so the person answering it is standing on the cash register. It is also the fastest place to learn, because you see every objection a brand's customers have, every day. The full listing is here.

How to apply when the role says 2+ years

Three moves, in order of how much they help:

1. Answer the specific sentence. Find the one oddly specific requirement in the listing and address it in your first two lines. For the designer role, that is branding plus social in one portfolio. For the reel creator, shooting and grading your own work.
2. Attach work, not claims. Three pieces with a line each on the problem, your decision and the result. A link that opens in one click beats an attachment nobody downloads.
3. Name the gap yourself. If you have one year against a two-year ask, say so and say what closes it. Candidates who name their own gap get read; candidates who hide it get caught in the first interview.

Then expect a task. Most agency hiring decisions are made on a small piece of real work, and the grading is less about the output than about what you did with an incomplete brief: did you ask the two clarifying questions, or did you guess? All eight of our current roles, with their full requirements, are on our careers page.