We Are Still Hiring Juniors. Especially Now

There is a decision being made across our industry right now, mostly without anyone announcing it. Agencies and studios are looking at what AI tools can do, looking at what junior staff cost, and quietly closing the entry level. No memo, just headcount that never gets replaced. The reasoning is always the same: the tools now do what juniors did.

We think this is a five-year mistake being made to flatter a one-year spreadsheet, and I want to put our contrary position on the record, because we are hiring three juniors this year and I keep being asked why.

The reasoning error

Start with the claim itself: AI does what juniors did. It is roughly true and completely beside the point. Junior work, the first-pass research, the resize suites, the initial explorations, was never primarily a product we sold. It was tuition. The industry got useful output from juniors while they were becoming seniors, and the output subsidized the becoming. Automating the output does not automate the becoming. It just removes the subsidy and, if you are careless, the becoming along with it.

Every senior person in this studio was once a junior whose early work could, by today's standards, have been generated. The judgment we sell now was built by doing that work badly, being corrected by someone better, and doing it again. There is no known shortcut through that loop. The tools compress the doing. They do not compress the correction, the taste formation, or the thousand client meetings absorbed by osmosis.

The market logic, for the unsentimental

If the craft argument leaves you cold, here is the cold version. Talent development is a supply chain with a five-to-eight-year lead time. The industry is cutting orders at the start of that chain simultaneously, which guarantees a shortage of mid-level and senior people on a predictable schedule. Studios that keep developing people through the gap will hold the scarce asset when it arrives. We have seen this movie in every downturn's hiring freeze: the freezers spend the recovery bidding desperately for the people the growers grew.

There is also a nearer-term edge. Our juniors are AI-native in a way that no amount of senior enthusiasm replicates. They arrive assuming the tools, and they find uses our leads do not. The mentorship now runs both directions, which is new, and honestly, energizing.

What we changed about the junior role

None of this means hiring juniors like it is 2019. The role needed redesign, and here is ours:

• Production drudgery is mostly gone, so we replaced it with deliberate practice: real briefs, real critique, on a weekly cycle. The tuition is now explicit instead of incidental.
• Every junior runs the tools and is expected to push past their defaults. First-pass output is the starting line of their job, not the finish.
• Client exposure comes earlier. The scarce skill is judgment in context, and context does not transfer secondhand.
• We evaluate on trajectory, not output volume. Volume is cheap now. Slope is everything.
• They learn on our dime, not yours. Juniors cut their teeth on internal projects and shadow client teams until they have earned a seat at the table. The senior-team promise our clients hire us for stays intact.

The bet, plainly

Kate and I started this studio believing that a smaller number of genuinely excellent people beats a larger number of adequate ones. Excellent people are made, not found, and the making has to happen somewhere. If the rest of the industry wants to stop making them, that is a competitive gift we intend to accept.

To the juniors reading this: the door here is open, the work is real, and nobody will hand you resizing tasks and call it development. Bring taste, or bring the ambition to build some. We will supply the rest.