Signet Jewelers

Aaron Ziff is Senior Director of HRIS at Signet Jewelers, leading global HR technology strategy and system optimization. He focuses on user-centered design, automation, and data governance to enhance efficiency, improve employee experience, and enable better, data-driven decision-making across organizations.

Shaping HRIS Leadership Approach

Having had the opportunity to lead several global implementations from scratch, consolidate systems in M&A contexts, and optimize existing deployments for large organizations, I’ve developed a few inviolable rules:

1. User-centered design – Rather than asking employees to adapt to a new system or process, meet them where they are. If a particular configuration or process design is confusing, it is incumbent on the HRIS team to make it clearer.

2. Simplicity – In line with the concept of parsimony, the fewer steps / clicks / options / permutations we can present to users, the better. The goal is not to ignore complexity, but to mask it. Keeping the “guardrails” narrow and well-defined helps prevent employees from inadvertently making the wrong choices.

“The purpose of investing in HR technology is to deliver information at scale that can help leaders in the company make better decisions.”

3. Automation – Human involvement or subjective judgments are responsible for the lion’s share of system errors. By reducing handoffs, options and distractions, we can eliminate the source of most mistakes and, in so doing, increase data quality and trust.

Balancing Efficiency and Experience

To me, these are not mutually exclusive or contradictory terms; it’s all a matter of perspective. Generally, the most efficient solution yields a better employee experience, but I do employ a number of particular strategies when attempting to bring control to a complex business process:

1. As a bottom-line objective, reduce clicks wherever possible.

2. Never make assumptions about what users know or don’t know.

3. Intuition is not a factor; spell things out and be explicit, using a combination of help text, pop-up analytics, links to reference documentation and job aids.

4. Definitions are critical to ensuring people understand expectations.

Challenges in HR Tech Modernization

Technical debt, customizations, misalignment of data definitions and workflows, organizational inertia (inefficient processes accepted as dogma)

Role of Governance and Integration

Without strong governance in place, there is a high risk that groups across the organization will adopt their own shadow processes and approval workflows, bypassing scrutiny and creating exceptions. There are always trade-offs when bifurcating / branching processes into multiple versions, including additional complexity and a heavier maintenance burden. Likewise, I’ve seen organizations with hundreds of poorly constructed, overlapping (redundant) or obsolete integrations that waste a lot of time and money recreating worthless endpoints. There are also real costs to data movement between vendors, especially for interdependent processes like hiring and onboarding, training and development, performance and talent, etc.

Evolution of Data-Driven HR Tech

The vendor landscape is constantly shifting to deliver what software companies believe customers want – and what will dazzle in a sales demo. The reality is, a strong foundation is the most important predictor of a successful deployment. Just like in sports, getting the fundamentals right is essential to ensuring that data entered into the system remains current, accurate and actionable. My thesis (and guiding light) has always been a simple equation: the purpose of investing in HR technology is to deliver information at scale that can help leaders in the company make better decisions. If the system design is too complicated or reporting is an afterthought, the organization will struggle to realize value from its investment, as trust in the data will be low and insights limited. If you fail to extract value in this regard, all you’ve got is a big, expensive [digital] filing cabinet.