What Azmun-e Faragir is
Azmun-e Estekhdami-ye Faragir-e Dastgahha-ye Ejraei-ye Keshvar, usually shortened to Azmun-e Faragir or simply Faragir, is Iran’s unified competitive examination for permanent recruitment into the executive agencies of the state. Instead of each ministry, provincial governorate or state body holding its own separate hiring test, Faragir bundles their advertised job codes into a single national notification, sits candidates for one common written examination on one day, and then hands the ranked shortlists back to each requesting agency for cadre level selection. The design is a direct response to duplicated hiring effort and to the volume of applications the state receives for permanent posts.
The exam has been running as a recurring cycle for more than a decade, numbered by round. The thirteenth round drew roughly 189,000 candidates, which is representative of its scale: a single Faragir cycle is one of the larger civil service recruitment events held anywhere in West Asia in any given year.
Who conducts it
Two national bodies split the work.
The National Organisation for Educational Testing, known in Persian as Sazman-e Sanjesh-e Amuzesh-e Keshvar and universally called Sanjesh, is the technical conducting body. Sanjesh publishes the daftarcheh (the round’s guidance and information brochure), runs the online registration portal at sanjesh.org, prints and distributes admit cards, holds the written examination across provincial centres, marks the answer sheets and publishes the results and rankings.
The Administrative and Recruitment Affairs Organisation of Iran, Sazman-e Edari va Estekhdami-ye Keshvar, is the policy owner. It consolidates the vacancies requested by each executive agency into the single Faragir call, sets the eligibility framework in line with Iran’s public employment law, and issues the final placement decisions after Sanjesh’s ranking and each agency’s cadre level interview. Practical announcements from either body are routinely mirrored by IRNA, ISNA, Mehr News and Tehran Times, which is useful when sanjesh.org is unreachable from outside Iran.
The general knowledge plus specialised knowledge structure
The written paper is in two blocks that both sit on the same day.
The general knowledge block, ma’lumat-e omumi, is common to every job code in that round. Its subjects are standard across Iranian public sector testing: Persian language and literature, Arabic, general English, computer literacy, general knowledge, Islamic and historical knowledge, and Iran’s constitutional and administrative law. Every candidate answers the same general paper regardless of which agency they applied to.
The specialised knowledge block, ma’lumat-e takhassosi, is mapped to the specific job code the candidate has applied for. A candidate applying to an accounting post takes accounting subject questions; a candidate applying to a civil engineering post takes civil engineering subject questions; and so on for every discipline in the daftarcheh. Marking follows the same negative marking rule as Iran’s other Sanjesh administered examinations, with a fraction of the mark of each question deducted for a wrong answer.
How ministry cadre matching works after the written test
The written test is a ranking exercise, not a hiring decision. Once Sanjesh publishes the results, the ranked shortlist for each job code is transferred to the specific executive agency that requested those posts. That agency then holds its own cadre level selection, which normally combines a specialised interview, a physical or medical fitness check where the post requires it, and gozinesh, the ideological and character vetting that Iranian public employment law makes mandatory for permanent civil service posts. Final placement is issued by the requesting agency once every stage clears.
How the teacher recruitment exam differs
Faragir does not cover primary and secondary teacher recruitment. Teachers enter the Ministry of Education, Vezarat-e Amuzesh va Parvaresh, through a separate cadre and are recruited through a dedicated Sanjesh administered examination whose scale, over 400,000 registrants in recent rounds, is larger than Faragir itself. The Iran teacher recruitment examination has its own guide on this site.