The Agency Copy Test Needs Rethinking
For decades, agencies hired writers with some version of the same exercise: a take-home brief, a weekend, and a set of headlines and body copy to come back with. The copy test showed who could find an idea and put it into words. Now every candidate has access to a generator that can produce competent lines in seconds.
The finished page no longer tells an agency much about the person who handed it in.
What the old copy test measured
Craft and fluency, mostly. Could the candidate write a line that sounded like advertising, adapt tone to a brand, produce enough options to suggest range? Those were useful signals when producing the words was the hard part.
They are weaker signals now, because producing the words is the easy part, and the test has not caught up.
The hard part of the job moved from writing lines to knowing which line to keep.
What agencies are testing instead
Judgement. Some creative directors now hand a candidate twenty lines, some good and most ordinary, and ask them to choose three and defend the choice. Others show a piece of finished work and ask what is wrong with it. Others run the brief live, in the room, where the conversation about the idea matters more than the page.
A few have stopped pretending the tools do not exist. They allow a generator openly and watch how the candidate uses it: whether they accept the first output, how they push it, what they throw away and why. That is close to how the job is actually done now.
What it means for candidates
A portfolio of polished lines is no longer a differentiator. What stands out is evidence of thinking: a short note explaining why an idea fits the brand, a rejected route and the reason for rejecting it, a sense of the audience that a generator would not have.
For agencies, the shift is overdue. Hiring on output always rewarded people who had been taught the formats, which often meant people from the same few colleges and cities. Testing for taste and reasoning, done well, could widen the door. Done badly, it becomes a test of confidence in a room, which narrows it again.
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