Let’s talk about something a lot of us in the industry think about but rarely say it out loud.
We “creatives” deserve to be hired, and mostly we deserve to be evaluated fairly.
After spending over 12 years in the industry, working with some of the biggest brands in the MENA region, I still see some talented and experienced creatives spending their weekends working on some full-fledged briefs, and guess what? They do it for free, simply to prove they’re good enough to be hired for a job they have been doing their entire career. And the more I see it happen, the harder it is to stay quiet about it.
Here is how it all goes down, and I believe most creatives reading this will relate immediately.
You see a job posting. The title is great; the part about culture and inclusivity is even better. They highlight creativity and collaboration, and you think, ‘Wow… this is it!’ So you hit apply, you update your portfolio and CV and write a cover letter that actually means something. You get a callback. The interview goes well, and the conversation feels real. They seem genuinely excited.
And then somewhere between the second meeting and the “next steps” email, a brief lands in your inbox. Real brief, with a real deadline on a Friday afternoon.
You spend your Saturday on it. Maybe your Sunday too. You push yourself because you actually want the job, because you care, and because that is just the nature of creative people. We cannot help it. We give everything even when we probably should not.
After submitting, you either never hear back at all or you receive a polite, very vague email telling you, ‘Thank you. We have decided to go in a different direction.’
A different direction? After giving it my all!!
Unfortunately, this is happening across agencies throughout UAE, Egypt, Canada and beyond. And it’s happening at scale, quietly, because everyone is too worried about burning bridges to say anything. The region’s creative industry is in constant demand for talent, and somehow this demand has been twisted into an excuse to extract free ideas from the very people you’re supposedly trying to hire.
We have spent years delivering big campaigns for global brands across the region and beyond at international agencies. Those agencies didn’t keep us for nothing. The clients did not keep coming back because our work was average. They came back because the ideas were good, culturally sharp and resonated with people. A portfolio built across years of great work is not a maybe, it’s proof. It’s a track record that should speak louder than a free brief produced under pressure with no compensation.
Taking the time to actually go through someone’s history of work and genuinely understand what it represents is the right way to assess talents and not by extracting free work and calling it a process.
And before someone suggests that this is simply how the industry works, I want to make it crystal clear that I’m not against proving myself. I would genuinely welcome a challenge. Give me a brief that has been executed, worked on and already been launched. Let me then show you how I would tackle it differently, where I would have pushed it further, and what I would have done to make it better. Now that’s a fair assessment without costing us our time and our self-worth in that unfair process.
It’s not acceptable to treat talented creatives like free resources simply because they need a job. We are not a shortcut. We are not a solution to your short-staff problem. We are the people who built your campaigns, wrote creative taglines, shaped your brand voice and stayed at the office late to make sure everything was right before it went live.
Evaluate us properly and pay us for our thinking. And if you’re not ready to do that, don’t post the job.
By Sara Ibrahim, Associate Creative Director
