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“Where you begin has nothing to do with where you go.”
Iliana Hall rebuilt her career from the file room up. Twenty-two years later, she’s reshaping how Fossil Group shows up for employees across the world — and holding the door open for everyone who comes next.
Iliana Hall’s career has had two beginnings. The first was in Mexico City, where she had built a successful executive path in marketing, PR, and sales. The second began in a file room in Dallas, at six in the morning, so she could leave early enough to pick up her daughters from school.
Hall was willing to move to the US with her two young daughters and her American husband and to start her professional life from scratch, even though her executive résumé didn’t yet carry weight in a new country. She was willing to start over completely, and Fossil Group was willing to let her.
“When you’ve had to rebuild personally and professionally, you understand what it means to give someone a chance — and how much you can learn from the people willing to take one on you,” says Hall, now VP of Total Rewards and Diversity at Fossil Group. “That’s what I try to do every day: come in, create change, support my teams, and make sure the next person doesn’t have to fight as hard as I did.”
Twenty-two years later, Hall has worked through nearly every benefit and HR role the company offers. Not every move was a promotion; she’ll tell you that plainly — and that’s okay because it’s allowed her to see her organization from different perspectives around the world. In turn, that’s made her a better leader, a better business partner, a better listener, and a more well-rounded HR expert.
“What I’m most proud of isn’t any single initiative or system we’ve built,” she says. “It’s the people. Some of my team members have been at Fossil for 34 years. They know this company in ways that can’t be documented or transferred; they carry it. And when you have that kind of depth and dedication around you, your job as a leader isn’t to manage them. It’s to protect the environment that made them want to stay.”
Recognition That Travels
The global nature of Hall’s work has forced her to question assumptions she didn’t know she had. Early in her tenure, she learned that a symbolic service award plaque, standard in many Western markets, was associated with funerary memorials in certain parts of Asia. This has been a contributing factor in her team’s redesigning the program and rebuilding it from scratch.
“Global service awards and recognition programs have to be tailored to local employees,” Hall says. “Celebrating tenure and acknowledging milestones may sound simple, but it’s a real driver of engagement, and getting it wrong sends exactly the wrong message.”
Those conversations have reshaped how Fossil shows up for its workforce worldwide. In India, Hall and her team strengthened maternity benefits and challenged policies that capped the number of nights a new mother could spend in the hospital. In Hong Kong and other markets, they expanded programs that directly support employees’ families, often driven by straightforward feedback from the field.
The thank-you notes from employees whose lives have been made easier by a new benefit or policy are the clearest signal Hall has that the work matters. “My goal is to make sure the infrastructure of people’s work lives is so solid they never have to think about it,” she says. “That’s what my team does across every area of Total Rewards — and those notes are how I know we’re getting it right.”
Holding the Door
Hall’s father modeled the disposition that made all of this possible: a devoted reader and chess player, “the smartest person I know”, he approaches every difficulty with courage, discipline, and curiosity, framing them as a learning opportunity and passing that mindset on to her. She found herself drawing on it just months into her move to the US, when she wasn’t sure she could make her new life work.
“It sure didn’t feel like the American Dream,” Hall says, laughing. “I moved to a place without any support system other than my husband. That can be incredibly isolating. But I just thought of how hard my dad worked and how he would never have called it anything other than an opportunity.”
A former Head of HR at Fossil offered Hall a similar kind of faith. He opened doors for her right after she moved to Dallas, mentored her across multiple roles, and gave her room to grow into the leader she’s become.
“I’ve been incredibly humbled to look back and see all the people who supported me as a mom navigating an executive career, as someone who started over more than once,” she says. “Representation matters, especially in the rooms where workplace culture and policy get shaped. I want to be someone who changes that not just by being in the room, but by mentoring others and holding the door open so the future of HR actually reflects the world we live in.”
Both and Everything
Hall has raised her twin daughters in Dallas, but made sure they feel as Mexican as they do American. When the girls were younger, they occasionally pointed out that they were the only kids without Easter baskets. Hall reminded them they were also the only kids with a Día de los Muertos celebration. Over the years, the family has found its own rhythm, weaving together the holidays and traditions that belong to all of them.
There will always be multiple languages at the dinner table. Hall says she is proud to have given her daughters a life where they can be fully, completely themselves, and that’s the same thing she hopes she’s offered her colleagues at Fossil, wherever in the world they happen to be.
“Restarting your career from scratch teaches you something no job title ever could. Your experience, your judgment, and your values come with you — even if your title suggests you’re back at the beginning,” says Iliana.
Iliana Hall is a thoughtful, people-first leader whose passion for creating inclusive and meaningful employee experiences is evident in everything she does. At Delta Dental of California and affiliates, we admire her like-minded leadership of Total Rewards and Diversity, which reflects a commitment to supporting employees while strengthening the organization’s culture and success. We are proud to partner with Fossil, working together to provide employees with access to quality dental and vision benefits that support overall well-being. We sincerely value our relationship with Iliana and the Fossil team and extend our congratulations on this well-deserved recognition!
Eurest is a leading provider of foodservice, hospitality and culinary experiences and a division of Compass Group. Since 1996, Eurest has partnered with many of the nation’s most respected employers and brands across corporate workplaces, manufacturing facilities, aviation, military, travel and leisure, and hospitality environments. Through workplace dining, marketplaces, catering, executive dining and other scalable hospitality solutions, Eurest creates engaging experiences that bring people together and add value for clients, guests and communities. At the heart of every partnership is a simple commitment: food first. hospitality always.
