Smardt's Head of Global Total Rewards on why compensation strategy must be grounded in business intelligence, not just benchmarks
Noble Poulose managed compensation and total rewards with multiple organizations before joining Smardt – a Montreal-based global provider of energy-efficient cooling solutions with operations in more than 10 countries and about 1,200 employees – as Global Director, Head of Global Total Rewards in September 2025. The organizations differ in many ways, but there’s one important piece of information he has gleaned from his experiences, he says.
"Total reward strategy cannot be disconnected," says Poulose. "Your recruiting strategy, your business strategy, and your talent strategy – those are the three key pillars that collaborate with your total rewards strategy – if these four aren’t in tandem, you're not achieving your objectives."
That alignment, according to Poulose, is the most consistently undervalued lever in the field – more consequential than any compensation formula or benchmarking tool. The most important aspect of the role, and the one he says is most often overlooked, is direct engagement with business leaders. "I have direct connection with each of my business leaders in each of the business units to really understand the pulse of what their priorities are and what they're working on," he says. "Having that view helps me advise them and gain their trust."
Building the total rewards canvas
When he arrived at Smardt one year ago, the company had grown through largely independent regional operations, according to Poulose. Before any compensation strategy could take shape, he identified a more fundamental need: the infrastructure required to support one. Career architecture, job profiles, salary ranges, benchmarking frameworks – the structural groundwork that turns global principles into local compensation decisions.
"A lot of my focus was really defining the core of the function,” he says. “Your career architecture, establishing the career level, the job profile – the basic foundational aspects of a strong HR system, because without that strong foundation, it is very difficult to scale."
Poulose believes that the relationship between that foundation and technology is direct. As Canadian organizations explore how AI is reshaping total rewards and compensation strategy, he argues the architecture must precede the automation. "Today we talk about a lot of AI-enabled HR, how total rewards can use AI, but if you don't have a strong foundation of the architecture and data, no AI can help," he says.
The structural shift at Smardt was broader than compensation design alone, says Poulose. The company's historical model gave significant autonomy to each regional operation. Over the past year, Poulose says he has built shared global principles that allow regional leaders flexibility without sacrificing coherence. "Our firm in the past operated as more regional organizations with a lot of independence for each of the regions, and really transforming the organization to more consistent global principles has been a big focus for us," he says. "It's really building the guardrails and handing it off to them to make sure that we have that consistent global philosophy."
AI as accelerant, not answer
Mercer's Global Talent Trends 2026 study found that AI and automation could replace more than half – approximately 52 per cent – of a total rewards team's workload, including routine employee inquiries and benefits administration. Poulose sees the shift clearly, but he reframes what it actually means for the function. Candidates and employees now arrive at compensation conversations armed with more sophisticated, AI-enabled positions. Total rewards professionals who don't keep pace risk becoming, in his words, irrelevant.
"If total rewards professionals aren’t smart enough and aren’t using AI in the right places, you're at a disadvantage because you are now answering a lot more sophisticated questions and queries from candidates or your managers," he says.
At Smardt, Poulose says his team is experimenting with an AI-powered compensation adviser that provides HR business partners and recruiters with a starting recommendation before any offer is made – drawing on salary ranges, career levels, and assessed skills and competencies. But that recommendation is a starting point, not a decision, he says.
"You get to your starting point faster than you would have been used to, and then you take the quality time to now validate whether that outcome is market relevant," Poulose says. "The skill that’s needed to judge whether that output is valuable, accurate, trustworthy, and usable is a skill that we'll have to continue to develop."
He makes an analogy of AI being similar to a new car: " The road is the same, the rules are the same. If you're not training the person how to drive that new car, then I think you're doing more harm than good," he says. “Just by giving the person a new car isn’t going to solve the problem.”
Learning agility and the pay transparency test
In 2020, Poulose wrote on LinkedIn that compensation should factor in more than an employee's existing skills. What he calls learning agility – the capacity to absorb, adapt, and apply new knowledge as conditions shift – has become a fundamental dimension of workforce value, one he has embedded into Smardt's talent and recruiting processes.
"With the rapid change in what's going on, that learning agility becomes a key part of every single role," he says. "Not just total rewards, every single role in the organization – if you're not using the latest tools that are out there in the market, then you're truly irrelevant."
At Smardt, learning agility is now assessed at hiring and incorporated into ongoing talent reviews, feeding directly into individual development conversations and the investments made in closing skills gaps, according to Poulose.
Looking ahead, pay transparency legislation across Canada is the development Poulose watches most closely. The principles are sound, he says, but the preconditions are not yet universal. "A fundamental assumption for all the pay transparency directives is that every organization is matured to assess their people and level them correctly," he says. "That whole pay transparency as a philosophy falls apart if you don't have a strong architecture as well as a strong assessment method."
As Canadian employers navigate compensation decisions amid shifting labour market and economic pressures, Poulose is clear about what ultimately drives success in the function: influence in total rewards is earned through business trust, not technical expertise alone.
"Once that trust is established, then you're able to be at the same table and be part of the business decisions," he says. "And that's what has been very, very valuable in that journey."
