01st July, 2026
Our Client is hiring a Director of Payroll to provide strategic leadership and continuous improvement for payroll functions across a heavily unionized, national, multi-district, multi-business-line healthcare organization. With 30,000+ employees and approximately 700 corporate staff, payroll operations operate at scale and require a leader who can strengthen process consistency, governance, and service delivery in a complex operating environment.
Reporting into the Senior Director of Payroll , this role owns the future-state payroll strategy and drives change initiatives that improve payroll performance across distributed operations. The payroll team includes 12 total team members, with direct reporting responsibility for 2. This is a net-new role, created to raise the bar on payroll execution through continuous improvement, strong implementation leadership, and Workday payroll/HRIS expertise.
The environment also includes frequent acquisitions and integrations, making exposure to M&A dynamics a strong advantage.
What You’ll Do (Role Responsibilities)
- Lead and execute a strategic payroll roadmap, improving accuracy, timeliness, compliance, employee experience, and internal controls.
- Drive continuous process improvement and process modernization across a national, multi-entity payroll model.
- Own change management and transition strategy for payroll-related initiatives, ensuring stakeholder alignment and operational readiness.
- Provide strategic payroll support and issue leadership, resolving complex payroll challenges and ensuring operational resilience.
- Lead Workday execution and optimization, serving as a key expert for both HRIS and payroll workflows.
- Support integration activities and acquisition-related transitions (preferred), ensuring continuity and governance through change.
- Navigate payroll complexity in enterprise systems and distributed environments, including experience that may extend across common payroll ecosystems (Workday exposure preferred).
- Coach and develop the payroll team, establishing performance expectations, accountability, and scalable ways of working.
- Ensure strong implementation practices: deliverables, timelines, risk management, and measurable outcomes.
What You Bring To The Table!
- Senior Manager / Director-level payroll leadership experience within a large, complex organization, with unionized environment experience strongly preferred.
- Expert-level Workday experience (as both an HRIS and payroll platform), with demonstrated ability to lead system/process improvement.
- Proven continuous improvement mindset with measurable results (accuracy, cycle time, compliance, efficiency, service levels).
- Strong change management and transition leadership capabilities, comfortable leading through ambiguity and operational shifts.
- Experience supporting payroll across multi-entity / national structures with distributed stakeholders.
- Acquisitions/M&A exposure preferred, including comfort supporting integrations and transition handoffs.
- Strong leadership presence, able to influence stakeholders and deliver payroll strategy through the team.
Position Details (At-a-Glance)
- 2–3 days per week onsite (Markham area) ** Flexible
- Compensation: $150,000–$155,000 Base Salary
- Bonus Target: 15%
- RRSP: 4% match
- Health Benefits : from Day 1
- Full Time Perm Role
JOB VACANCY STATUS
The organization is accepting applications with the intention to hire as soon as possible.
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