Frog Blog - Wyn Brand

By Wyn Brand, Marketing & Communications Coordinator, Frog Recruitment

"My name is Wynand, welcome to my blog. You may be here for a variety reasons, but I hope you're here because you're curious - 'cause so am I. Information is important. Without information, we are limited in the choices we make. So, it is my sincere wish that you can learn something while you're here. Main topics covered is marketing and general business, with a bit of human interest in there too."

Hiring for Innovation
I recently caught a German documentary by the name of ‘Work Hard, Play Hard’, which raised some interesting questions about hiring staff to fit work models. Employees were shown to go through rigorous testing, activities and interviews to ascertain their personalities, working styles and where they would fit into a team. What this meant is that employers ended up with a homogenous group of staff who fit within a preconceived model. While this kind of scientific management is great if it is essential for running routine systems, I wondered how systems are improved or adapt to the environment if all staff are hired for a specific fit. How would they innovate the system if everyone thinks the same way?

Interview Question: Why Should I Hire You?
A lot of people dread this question at job interviews. So much, in fact, that it made the Forbes list of 10 toughest questions at job interviews. I wanted to find out how frequently recruiters actually ask this question, and what they really wanted to know, in hopes of uncovering the best way to answer. So I asked six professional recruiters what they think. Curiously, none of them actually asked this question…

Lessons from Gaming
In the 1700’s it was the vilification of books.
In the 1980’s it was the vilification of heavy metal music.
And in the 2000’s it’s the vilification of video games...

The Real Value of Tertiary Education
Having attended a belated graduation ceremony this week, I’ve fallen victim to bouts of reflection over the real value of tertiary education. I couldn’t help but think of the C-grade students who will desperately struggle to secure employment in their field, and what the future may hold for them.

Quiet Achievers: What you need to know about introverts
What is an introvert? Generally, an introvert is someone who feels drained by social interaction and energized by the conversation in their head.  According to Dr. Marti Laney, introverts require silence to concentrate, seem aloof, like to work on complex projects, need to understand why they are doing something, dislike interruptions, work alone, stay behind their desk, and have trouble remembering names and faces. It’s easy to see how introverts are simply bad at marketing themselves.

Crafting employer brand personalities to attract top talent
The type of talent a business attracts depends on the type of personality it exudes as an employer. As we progress deeper into the knowledge economy, where the supply of specialized knowledge is growing slowly in proportion to demand, certain types of employer brand personalities will be better at appealing to talent you want to attract.

Balancing work, life and study
With the increasing dominance of Gen Y in the workplace, a kerfuffle about work-life balance has arisen around the generation that enjoy, you know… having a life.

Career advice for 18 year olds
I saw the question on a postcard- “What career advice would you give your 18 year old self?” While this advice is not specifically for myself, this is what I would say so school leavers in general.

Forget Motivation – Seek Truth
I’m one of those pesky logical people you see lurking around the office. I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist, so in other words, I enjoy dealing with reality on reality’s terms.

Direct Mail Ideas
Christmas cards are one of those inevitable facts of being in business. So instead of boring your prospects to death, get creative.

Five things I learned in 2011
I like to think I did quite a lot this year. Sure, I didn’t win a Nobel Prize or discover penicillin, but I’m young, and there’s still time.

HR and Marketing: non-overlapping magisteria?
The biologist S.J. Gould once introduced the notion of “non-overlapping magisteria”, or the idea that two areas of thinking do not compete or clash with each other. I want to take some time to consider the symbiosis between HR and Marketing, and how they overlap.

Employer brands – what are they and where did they come from?
Right, let’s begin with the basics: What are brands and how are they different to each other?

The Future of M
There are two big M’s at the moment:

• M-theory – a unifying theory of physics
• M-marketing – a unifying theory of marketing

Targeting – The Good and the Bad
After attending a recent seminar hosted by the New Zealand Marketing Association, one thing has become patently clear – TARGETING is a hot topic

Epistemology – a conflict management tool
It’s a mouthful, but epistemology in a nutshell is the philosophy of knowledge, how it’s acquired, and what it is.

Getting Started with Social Media Business Pages
How to enter the social media scene as a business is a FAQ constantly popping upon business websites.

Working with Introverts
You can’t get away from us, we’re everywhere! Well, actually, we’re probably at home having a rest…

Working with ORANGE DNA
As a university student in the recession, I had an array of jobs due to several redundancies, so when I hear talk about ‘on-boarding’ new employees, it’s a process that I’ve been on the receiving end of enough times to know a thing or two about.