Kelly Services’ Hugo Malan on data-driven leadership and metrics that matter

Leading with meaning can be difficult in today’s business world. But what if we told you that there is a playbook for this?

In this episode of Reveal, host Dana Feldman chats with Hugo Malan, President at Kelly Services, about how the modern workforce’s desire for meaningful work reshapes leadership strategies. 

Hugo shares his strategic framework—comprised of five pivotal questions—essential for navigating today’s changing market landscape. 

Hugo touches on the vital tools and strategies CROs need to stay ahead, from innovative uses of AI in digital transformation to a practical approach for aligning metrics with business decisions. 

Because at the end of the day, if you’re not leading with meaning, then you’re not leading at all.

Dana Feldman: What do the world’s best CROs have in their playbooks? This is the place to find out. This is Reveal, the Revenue Intelligence Podcast. I’m your host, Dana Feldman. Hi, I’m Dana Feldman, and this is Reveal, the Revenue Intelligence Podcast. Each episode, we’re focused on helping you build the ultimate CRO playbook. We promise to give you access to the most influential revenue leaders at the world’s top companies so that you too can achieve your revenue goals. And in this episode, I’m delivering on that promise with my guest, Hugo Malan, president, Kelly Science, Engineering, Technology, and Telecom at Kelly Services.
Hugo’s diverse experience has given him a global, cross-industry understanding of what drives transformation and success across large complex organizations. In today’s episode, we’ll focus on Hugo’s journey and expertise in leadership, emphasizing integration of analytical approaches into human capital management and strategic decision-making, and we’ll also explore his insights on navigating digital transformation, leveraging AI, and optimizing talent acquisition strategies in today’s very competitive landscape. So let’s dive in. Hugo, welcome to the show. I’d love to start with you giving our listeners a little bit of your professional background and the journey of how you’ve ended up where you are today.

Hugo Malan: Thanks, Dana. It’s nice to be here. The journey has been quite a random walk, but very briefly, I grew up in South Africa. I studied electronic engineering, first in Stellenbosch, and then ultimately in Cambridge in England. I briefly worked for a startup in London, but then eventually I got a job with a consulting firm called McKinsey in New York, and looked like a wonderful time to be in New York, so I flew across the Atlantic with my two suitcases, not knowing a soul but looking for adventure. And New York was wonderful, exciting, lots going on. From McKinsey I ended up going to Lehman Brothers, and then after a stint in retail, I started working in the staffing industry about a decade and a half ago.

Dana Feldman: What a journey. What originally got your attention in moving into the management consulting side of things with McKinsey?

Hugo Malan: I spent years studying engineering and I enjoyed it a lot, and I did a fair amount of research in engineering, but the further I went down that path, the more I realized that I should probably choose to either become a specialist in engineering and a true expert in something, and devote my life to that, or start working a bit more with people, and ultimately working through people. And as I reflected on both, it looked to me more appealing to start drifting into a managerial direction, and McKinsey is a place that has a great reputation for taking people from a technical background that know absolutely nothing about business, and I really resembled that, and bringing them up to speed, and ultimately showing them the ropes in the business world and allowing the progress in that fashion.

Dana Feldman: I love it. And such an interesting time for you to also be part of Lehman Brothers, I believe, during the time you were there too. So it is a journey. Talk to me a little bit about what is your mission in your current role at Kelly SET, and what gets you and your team up every day and really excited about?

Hugo Malan: Well, there’s a component to what we do that truly is mission driven at Kelly. We like to think that we connect people with work in ways that ultimately enrich their lives. Specifically in SET, we believe we are the experts at hiring experts to solve the world’s most critical challenges in science, engineering, technology and telecom. So I think what gets us up in the morning, on the one hand, is that we’re spending our days finding people jobs, or from the client perspective, helping companies find the people they need to do their business really well. Both those things are good for the economy and for the people involved, and so it feels great from that perspective. But then of course for someone with a nerdish background who really enjoys technology and technological things, the fact that I’m able to participate in some small way in the science, engineering and technology and telecom world adds an additional enjoyment element to me, and I feel that the work that many of our contractors or our associates are engaged in with clients are truly cutting edge, and ultimately in their small way, each of them are contributing to making the world a slightly better place.

Dana Feldman: In this role, and certainly with your global reach, I’d love for you to share a little bit around some of your leadership philosophy, and just help some of the listeners understand how you approach leadership in the role that you’re currently in now.

Hugo Malan: I think leaders really have only one purpose, and that is they’re there to help their teams be successful. Now there’s numerous elements to that. There’s making sure the team is spending its time on things that really matter and really advanced the course they’re working on, but there’s also just being that extra pair of eyes, helping people think through things and helping them overcome obstacles. And then of course there is being in the trenches with them rolling up your sleeves and ultimately figuring out together. So there’s many elements of leadership, but perhaps the most significant is simply being somebody that cares about what your people and what the team that you’re privileged to lead are doing every day. It really matters if you’re doing a difficult job, and let’s face it, these days most jobs are difficult jobs. To know that there is somebody that’s going to truly care about the results you’re delivering and about the struggles you’re having, and being that person that cares about the team is perhaps the single most important attribute of being a leader.

Dana Feldman: Do you think there is a certain way or framework or approach that you have that really does bring through that care to your teams that others could learn from? Is there anything you subscribe to, to make sure that that comes out first and foremost as a leader?

Hugo Malan: Well, a wise person told me, very early in my career, “People do their best jobs if they’re feeling good about themselves.” And so creating an atmosphere where people feel empowered and encouraged and appreciated makes a huge difference. It doesn’t mean that you don’t also need to identify opportunities for development. We all have those, and it’s great to hear about them. Not always fun in the moment, but always a growth experience. And so that’s also a role of a leader. But letting your team feel good about the work they’re doing and feel good about themselves is the surest path to success and to productivity.

Dana Feldman: I couldn’t agree more. I’m curious, in your journey, what was it that drove you to get into leadership? Is there something memorable where you made that decision? Did you happen chance into leadership? Just talk a little bit about what made you make this shift into actually leading teams.

Hugo Malan: It’s something that happens somewhat naturally at many companies. You start off as an individual contributor, and I did, and once you’ve mastered that, the assumption is you can now help other people along that same journey to be successful individual contributors. And that’s always the first step in leadership, is managing a small team of folks who are also individual contributors. As I started down that path, I realized that that is a way to eventually have much more impact. An individual person can only accomplish so much. As you start working with teams, you can accomplish and contribute so much more, not through your own efforts, but through making the team successful and helping them to be productive in their own right. And then as the teams, over time, get bigger and bigger, that opportunity and that privilege to have even more impact through other people just continues to grow. It never ceases to be satisfying and rewarding to work with a great team and play a small part in their success.

Dana Feldman: I hear you on that, and it’s never a boring day in leadership either. So it’s pretty fun to see all that comes our way on a day-to-day basis. I know that talent acquisition and management is a topic that is so near and dear to our audience’s hearts, and would love for you to discuss a little bit about how your journey through different staffing companies, including Kelly, has influenced your perspective on talent acquisition and management.
Talent Acquisition and Management

Hugo Malan: The expectation of applicants these days continues to evolve. It used to be that you would simply need to describe the job and make a compelling case for the compensation and the benefits, and you’d find the applicants that you’d need, as long as you are consistent with what was being offered in the market. But these days, increasingly, applicants are looking for more than that. People are no longer contented with just a job, they also want a job that’s actually meaningful, and where they feel they are contributing to a meaningful cause. And it is certainly no longer enough to, in job descriptions, just outline the experience necessary and the specific tasks, and the other elements of the role. But increasingly you also have to explain, both in the description and also in subsequent conversations, why this job is really meaningful, and why what this company does is really meaningful. And employers that are focused on that and defining that clearly, and ultimately not just saying it but really doing it and believing it, really have an advantage in the market.

Dana Feldman: Really fascinating. I think that that would be very helpful to our listeners around maybe how they’re looking at how they go about when they take a candidate through the journey and if they are talking to those things. I know that you have really emphasized bringing an analytical approach to human capital and leadership. So will you take a couple minutes and just elaborate on how this philosophy has shaped your management style and decision-making process?

Hugo Malan: Business is still business, whether you’re in the human capital side of things or manufacturing something or doing something completely different, you’re measured in a very consistent way by your ability to grow revenue and your ability to translate that revenue also into growth at the bottom line. And so there’s certain basic elements of analytics that translate across all businesses. As you start digging into whatever business you happen to be in, you will find that there’s different operating metrics that give you a better indication of where your revenue is going to end up, or where your EBITDA or your profit is going to end up. In our particular world, you can look at things like the number of orders that you’re bringing in, in aggregate. That’s a really good indication of how many orders you’re going to fill, and then what will translate to revenue. But then other obvious operating metrics, in our world, are things like what is the bill and the pay rates of the orders, and therefore what sort of gross profit are you going to generate? You can also look at the cost per fill. So normally by studying a business a bit, it fairly easily allows itself to be analyzed, and ultimately the specific metrics to be identified, that will be predictive of what you’re trying to accomplish. The best advice that I can give is identify just the five or six critical operating metrics. Some businesses go overboard and you end up with dozens or even hundreds. It’s really difficult to keep your eye on even dozens of things, let alone hundreds. But if you’ve got five or six that you can watch, that really tell you where your business is going, and perhaps just as importantly, not just that you can watch but around which you can develop an intuition, so that even small changes start ringing alarm bells appropriately and suggest specific actions to you. That really helps in the successful management at any P&L.

Dana Feldman: Do you have a certain cadence or approach on how you review those top six to seven inputs to your business that you can share with the listeners about how you go about making sure that you’re reviewing, staying on top, tweaking, getting the feedback?

Hugo Malan: Yeah. Over the years, as certain cadence has evolved, there’s some things that you do, typically annually, because you want to make decisions on an annual basis around things like strategy and budgets and so forth. There’s some things which you want to do quarterly, because on a quarterly basis you can really take stock of where you are in terms of your large expenses, in terms of big trends for the business and so forth. Other things lend themselves to a monthly view. Most companies close their books every month, and that’s a really healthy practice. So you can see precisely what the P&L did in the most recent month. But then other things you want to take a look at weekly. The great thing in professional services, specifically in our world, is that the business can respond very quickly, both to positive trends in the market and to negative trends in the market. And even within the space of a week, you can start seeing whether there’s an uptick in orders. If, for example, you launched a new sales contest, or you launched a new sales capability or training, the evidence of that should be clear within the space of weeks. Other things take significantly long, like if you hire entry-level people in our world, that takes months, even as much as a year or two for them to become fully productive. And so the impact of that is slower, but typically on a weekly basis, you want to take a really close look at operating metrics, on a monthly basis, keep a close look on your P&L.

Dana Feldman: I have to ask, I know that organizations like McKinsey, where you spent some time, are really quite known for their frameworks and philosophies on how they approach problems or leadership or a variety of topics. Is there a particular framework or something that you took from your time there that you bring with you to each of the organizations you’ve been at, that you could share with the listeners and kind of read them into something that might be near and dear to your heart as part of just your general operating rhythm or leadership philosophy?

Hugo Malan: Yeah, I worked with many frameworks at McKinsey. You’re quite right that they are well known for the frameworks that they construct and that they use. I’ve eventually settled on one that I’m happy to share with the listeners, that to me seems very simple on the face of it, but also I believe gives you the insight into your business that you need strategically. I end up just asking five questions, and I feel if you’ve got these five answered, you have a strategy. You can go arbitrarily deep on any one of these five. But they really, to me, are the essential questions around any strategic decision making in the company. So you start off by asking, “Who am I going to sell to?” It seems as simple, but from that you can ask which geographies, which market segments, which industry verticals, which buying personas, large companies, small companies. So there’s a richness around that question that you can fully explore. If you know who you’re going to sell to, you should also ask, and maybe not in this sequence because they’re related, but, “What am I going to sell?” Is it physical products? Is it services? If it’s services, what sort of services? But it’s really important to know what are you bringing to the market that you’re going to sell. Then, “How am I going to sell?” Do I have a large sales force, a small sales force? Do I sell online? Is it a combination? Do I sell differently to large companies than to small companies? And then, how am I going to differentiate? Because it’s all well and good to know who you want to sell to and how you’re going to sell, and even what your products are going to be, but if your products are not differentiated versus the competitors, you’re not going to be successful. So you have to have a reason why somebody should buy from you versus somebody else. And then finally, if you do all of that, you still have to deliver, and so hence the last question, “How am I going to deliver?” But by leading a company or a team in a structured exploration of these five questions, and by answering them in a systematic way, ultimately you create a strategy without even realizing that you’re doing it. But if you’ve answered these comprehensively, you typically have a plan that you can execute against.

Dana Feldman: First of all, thank you for those. You are giving us part of your playbook, which is phenomenal. You just mentioned if you explore these in a structured way, it has me curious, is there a certain way you would recommend to explore these five questions with your team or is it just more about taking the time to really deeply think through them? Let us know what your thoughts are there.

Hugo Malan: I love the McKinsey approach to this sort of thing, which is they call it hypothesis-driven problem solving. So start with the five questions and have the team just write down what they think the answer is for each of those questions in two or three sentences. And that’s your initial hypothesis. And then you start drilling into it, and start looking for facts that can either validate those hypotheses or perhaps suggest that you’re wrong. So if you think you’re going to differentiate, for example, in a certain way, we are going to differentiate based on if it’s professional services, our expertise, and the speed with which we can fulfill client requests, and perhaps the sophistication of our service, well then let’s go and measure ourselves against competitors and see can we truly claim to be greater experts? Do we have more intellectual property? Do we employ more sophisticated individuals or people with sophisticated educations? But you can literally start asking yourself, “Can I prove that this is a reasonable hypothesis?” And through that process of trying to prove your hypothesis, you’ll inevitably start asking additional questions, come to deeper understandings, and eventually perhaps validate your hypothesis and say, “Yes, this is a path for us,” or, “No, we’d like this to be a path, but we actually have some work to do to be able to claim that we can differentiate in that way.”

Dana Feldman: I can feel your engineering background and roots coming out in some of this too, which is great. I might pivot us a little bit in terms of topics, a very important subject matter which is digital transformation, and would really love to get your take on where do you think digital transformation is going next?

Hugo Malan: Well, I’ll give the obvious answer because I think it might be the right one. Digital transformation, I think, is being taken into an entirely different orbit, if you will, by the impact of AI. There are many companies have been walking along the digital transformation journey, and it means many things, but creating internal digital capabilities, creating sophisticated analytics, creating external interfaces with which they can interact with their clients, and even in our industry with candidates. So there’s many elements to digital transformation. But now that we can deploy AI, there’s so much more that we can do, and so many more interesting use cases to explore. Clearly, and many people have said this, we’re just scratching the surface in terms of both the capabilities of AI, but also our understanding of how to effectively use it in business.

Dana Feldman: I think that that is a really in-the-moment thing that organizations are facing, which is, “How do we leverage AI? What’s out there? How do we take advantage of it? How do we leverage it?” I’m wondering, as you’ve gone on this journey a little bit yourself with AI, if you have any learnings or thoughts around how to approach just starting to tap into this AI craze, and how companies can actually leverage it?
Implementing AI in the Workplace

Hugo Malan: I’ll tell you the approach we’ve taken that we are quite excited about so far, and that is to let everybody play an experiment, rather than us deciding some smart people will get in a room and tell us all how we’re going to now use AI. And there’s some of that. But what we’ve done is we’ve made AI available to every person in the company. If you do that, you have to be careful because there are some risks around inherent biases in some of the AI models. There’s been a lot written about that. There’s also just some data leakage risk. And so you do it by creating private instances inside a very strict walled garden, and on top of that, you’re providing training and guidance about what is appropriate to do with AI and what is not. But as long as you take those precautionary steps, which are relatively well established at this point, what we’ve discovered is that there is so much creativity out there. If you let many people experiment with AI, the learning is so much faster. Now what you want to build if you do that, is also a mechanism for capturing the learnings. So if one person discovers a new way of using AI that nobody else has thought of, you want to be able to get that back to everybody and say, “Here’s a really clever use case you should all know about.” But by taking that approach, making it very broadly available, in a safe way, and then creating a feedback mechanism so that clever and creative learnings and discoveries are very rapidly syndicated to everybody. We’ve seen just quantum steps in terms of the learning as discoveries are quickly disseminated across a whole large population. And the impact has been really remarkable.

Dana Feldman: This is really, really interesting how you all are approaching it. I think fascinating in the sense of opening it up to everyone and saying, “Teach us what is possible with AI,” versus trying to figure out yourselves. I’m curious, what does that feedback loop look like there for you and your team? If there’s any light you can shed on it that might help other leaders think about what they might want to implement just the same for their organizations.

Hugo Malan: We’ve a mechanism where, for example, people can submit their prompts for including in a prompt library that we keep centrally. So everybody’s playing with the AI and if they discover a particular prompt, and I think most listeners will know what that is if they’ve played around with ChatGPT-4. But it’s literally a little bit of just natural language guidance telling the AI to do something. But it really depends precisely how you structure that instruction, the quality of the response you get. So if people discover a really clever prompt that makes the AI do something really useful, then we’ve communicated to all of them, “Please submit this and we’ll capture it and you’ll get recognition for that in our central prompt library,” and we make the central prompt library available to everybody. So it’s growing all the time, and we’re over hundreds of entries at this point across a whole range of different use cases, many more than we could have ever thought up if we just put a few smart people in a room to think about this.

Dana Feldman: Is there one particular use case that has you really excited or maybe surprised you the most, or maybe got you thinking the most about based on what’s bubbled up?

Hugo Malan: A lot of what we do in the staffing world is play with unstructured data. A resume is, at best, a semi-structured data set, and most job descriptions are the same. Large language models are really good at dealing with this sort of data. So things like, “Please reformat this resume in a standard way,” is a prompt, if you teach it first what you consider to be your standard. That’s really effective. Where previously it would have taken somebody some minutes to reformat that resume, now it’s instant. Or, “Please extract, from this resume, skills and experiences and then measure it against this job description over here that has certain skills and experience requirements and tell us the fit.” That sort of thing, it’s remarkably good with. But in the spirit of sharing some slightly counterintuitive and interesting outcomes, where we found it was interesting is recruiters use Boolean expressions a lot. That’s things like creating searches with a little bit of mathematical logic. So, “Find me somebody that has this experience but not this and worked here but not there.” In other words, it’s this series of logical tests that get strung together in a larger expression, and then they can use that to search across databases. Well, the syntax can vary a little bit, that these databases require. Turns out ChatGPT knows more, so you can ask ChatGPT to help you to construct the perfect search. And we’ve been really pleased to see how folks have used it very creatively to much more efficiently search through databases than they’ve been able to do in the past.

Dana Feldman: I love that. It gets me so excited. And honestly, you also touched in there on how just some little innovations with AI can save so much time of what people are doing manually today, which is very near and dear to my heart too. You did bring up the word around data, and so I want to shift a little bit in the conversation too. I’m hearing from you a little bit more around and how that underpins how you drive strategies, and so I’d love to maybe just start on getting you to elaborate a little bit on the importance of quantitative data and understanding what’s working and what’s not in the business.

Hugo Malan: It’s critically important, which I don’t think most folks would disagree with in business, but it’s still, I think, underappreciated how meaningful it can be to identify, we spoke about this earlier on, the six or seven or eight critical metrics that is predictive of where your business is going, and then studying them long enough, not just once, but studying them week after week after week so that you can really develop an instinct around them, and eventually you can look at them and the trends just tell you a story, but that doesn’t happen immediately. Some critical elements of that is you’ve got to make sure they’re right. It’s astonishing how frequently people will look at data points in business, and because business is, by its nature, a complex world, and often you’ve got multiple different systems that you’re trying to reconcile and pull data from. Investing time to make sure that the definitions are really clear, you know what a specific metric means, and that it really means what you think it means, is critical. But getting that handful of reliable metrics is really how you can inform your decision-making. It seems to me, from what I’ve observed through my career, the pace of business is just continuing to accelerate, and the business cycles are becoming shorter and more violent in some ways. So your need to respond really quickly is just growing all the time. And the only way to be able to respond proactively and thoughtfully is to have the data at hand to both tell you that there’s a change coming or that the trend is shifting, so that you can know you need to respond, but then also to then allow you to calibrate your response. Again, in the staffing world, the thing we wrestle with is if demand turns up and you start hiring then, you’re too late, because it takes six to 12 to even 18 months for folks to become productive. So you’ve got to anticipate when demand is likely to turn up and start building your capacity proactively in anticipation. But you can only do that if you’ve got a bit of a gut instinct as to what the market is going to do, but if that gut instinct is informed by some really clear, well-defined and precise metrics.

Dana Feldman: Yeah, I was going to ask you, how do you balance the market intelligence, the gut read on the market with the insights from within your business when you’re making those strategic decisions?

Hugo Malan: I think the answer is with great difficulty. There are no great crystal balls out there, especially the staffing industry is trickier to forecast, because by definition you are providing capacity to companies at the margin. They might use you if they need a little extra capacity without wanting to take on the fixed cost to provide temporary people or temporary talent, but it also means that they make decisions there more rapidly. If they think demand is turning down a little bit, that’s probably where they’re going to cut back earliest. If they think demand is turning up, they’re going to try and add there immediately. But it means for us in the staffing industry that our business is quite volatile, more so than the general economy. And so I think we watch it like hawks collectively for any indication of whether there’s going to be a positive or a negative trend.

Dana Feldman: Do you have any examples that you could share of strategic initiatives that you’re pretty passionate about, and how data has actually informed those initiatives for either increased profitability or efficiency, or maybe perhaps a different outcome that you might have seen?

Hugo Malan: There’s quite a few to speak about. One such initiative is we are increasingly shifting our mix of business from the classic staffing offerings, which is helping with permanent placement, but also with temporary labor, to more project-based work, and even full-blown outsourcing. We are doing that in response to what we see as a shift in demand of our clients. Clients increasingly want to buy solutions. They’re not satisfied with just temporary labor, which they then got to direct and then ultimately make productive. They would much prefer to come to us and say, “We’d like to outsource this entire function in this lab or in this factory to you, and please just do it,” and we’ll operate on that basis. So that’s an exciting one. It’s very much informed by data that we have around how client demand is changing. It’s also informed by data showing that ultimately we can create more success this way. We see lower turnover, in general, in those sorts of situations. We can typically offer much more attractive benefits and long-term career prospects for the candidates, and we can create these great solutions for our clients. So it’s a win on all fronts, and we can see all of that in the data. So that’s been a really fast-growing part of our business, which has been nice to follow.

Dana Feldman: I’d love to pose one last question that I ask all of our guests. Ultimately, as a leader who owns revenue, what is your unfiltered, hot take on something that you’re seeing in revenue teams right now?

Hugo Malan: I think we’re in a holding pattern at this point in the economy, and in our business, and it’s driven by the fact that there’s a lot of uncertainty in the world. Election years are uncertain, but we have geopolitical uncertainty and all sorts of other factors contributing. It would be great for all of us, participating in the US economy, if we can get to slightly more certain waters and navigate those for a while. Because I think the economy has the potential for phenomenal job creation and growth and everything else, but everybody’s waiting. I’d love to get past the waiting period and get on with a healthy growth period again.

Dana Feldman: I’m with you on that one, Hugo. Well, thank you so much for giving us your time today. I really appreciate you joining us for this episode, and there’s so many golden takeaways from what you shared, so we appreciate it. So with that, Hugo, we’ll close out on this episode, and just a sincere thank you again.

Hugo Malan: My pleasure.

Dana Feldman: Thanks so much for joining us for this episode. Follow Gong on LinkedIn for our tactical takeaways from this conversation, including the best plays to add to your playbook. For more revenue leadership insights, check out gong.io/theedge, and be sure to follow the show to never miss an episode.