Our April HR news roundup focuses on marketing's role in talent acquisition, office seating arrangements, vacation time, and more. Dive in!

Marketing Influences Talent Acquisition

Your team is hard at work, trying to recruit the best employees for your organization...but there's another key player in the mix: your marketing department. "Marketing is the expert in sentiment and plotting customer in this case, talent journeys," Kristin Kelley, chief marketing officer of Randstad North America told SHRM. "Getting a job is one of the most emotional experiences people go through. Marketing tends to take the lead on understanding those personal moments and managing the channels where people expect to see those sentiments on social media, on Glassdoor, on the careers site." It's critical to think about your organization's reputation, what others are saying about you, how you can stand out, and how you can relate to and attract your potential employees.

A Change in Scenery Matters

When you introduce a change in office seating arrangements, some employees might find it disruptive and annoying...but according to the Harvard Business Review, it actually increases communication, collaboration, and creativity. "Once you've learned enough about the area you specialize in, exposure to new people will make you more creative," Sunkee Lee, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told HBR. "In particular, physical proximity promotes trust and the exchange of valuable and novel knowledge between newly met peers. Given the ability to do so, you will recombine this new knowledge with your own to innovate."

Take a Vacation, Already!

Did you know that, on average, employees in the U.S. are only using about half of their vacation time each year? And when they do go on vacation, many can't actually get away from work. But encouraging your employees to take time off is important and can help them avoid burnout, alleviate stress, and increase engagement and productivity. "Employees are not able to expend energy continuously. Rather, it is best to pulse between spending and recovering energy," Susan Kuczmarski, co-founder of Kuczmarski Innovation, told FierceCEO. "Vacations allow us to restore, re-energize and re-generateso we can begin fresh again, ready to positively impact our work agenda."

IT Workspaces Are Growing Up

Gone are the days of using the company pool table, beer fridge, and free sugary snacks as recruitment tools. It's time to make way for perks and benefits that show you care about employees' health and professional development common areas, wellbeing rooms, standing desks, certification programs, and more. "We are moving to a new office, primarily as a tool to help us recruit new industry-leading talent," Taylor Toce, CEO of Velo IT Group, told SHRM. "This new office is bright and open; but you won't find video games, ping pong tables or a soda fountain. We have found these items do not contribute to a professional work environmentbut rather distract from the success of production that the true professional desires."

Employee Retention: Are You Up to the Challenge?

You have valuable employees who want to grow within your organization. And when you give them the opportunity to do so, you'll reap the benefits...otherwise, you risk losing your MVPs. Case in point: after working as an award-winning stock analyst for eight years, Whitney Johnson was looking for a new challenge. In her recent Harvard Business Review article, she wrote, "I've always liked mentoring and coaching people, so I approached a senior executive about moving to a management track. Rather than offering his support, he dismissed and discouraged me. His attitude was, We like you right where you are. I left within the year."

What is your organization doing to help your best employees advance?