Bupa’s £18.2B Hiring Lesson: 6 Hours Beats a 45-Minute Vibe Check
A 45-minute executive interview is how you buy a six-figure mistake with a nice handshake. Bupa’s Iñaki Ereño spends six hours hiring senior people—and the wine test is the least important part.
A 45-minute executive interview is how you buy a six-figure mistake with a nice handshake.
Bupa CEO Iñaki Ereño has a better idea: three meetings, two hours each, including a meal where he watches how candidates behave when the PowerPoint version of themselves runs out. At a company that generated £18.2 billion in 2025 revenue, that is not overkill. It is cheaper than hiring one polished dud.
Bupa’s six-hour hiring process is the story—not the wine
Ereño told Fortune he abandoned the standard one-hour interview because it did not give him enough information and led to too many hiring mistakes. His replacement is simple: six hours across three separate meetings.
First comes a two-hour walk through the candidate’s CV. Not a quick skim, either. The point is to establish what they actually did, what decisions they owned, where they failed and whether their story remains intact once someone asks a second and third question.
Then comes a breakfast or lunch meeting. This is where the headlines have gone: Ereño says he notices whether a candidate has the confidence to order a glass of wine if he is drinking water. He is looking for initiative rather than automatic compliance. He also pays close attention to how people treat hospitality staff.
The final two hours return to the office and get more personal: what the person wants from Bupa, what they see in the business, and the life behind the résumé.
The wine order is colourful, so naturally it is what travelled. But if you copy that bit, you have missed the point badly. You do not need a weird little ritual. You need more evidence before you hand someone authority over customers, staff, capital and culture.
Bupa is not a tiny founder-led business where a bad hire is annoying but survivable. It reported 67.8 million customers in 2025, revenue up 11% to £18.2 billion, and underlying profit up 16% to £1.009 billion at constant exchange rates. It also opened more than 100 health provision sites around the world during the year. Ereño has led the group since January 2021, after years running Bupa businesses in Spain, Europe and Latin America. That scale makes the underlying lesson sharper: senior hiring is capital allocation. Treat it with the same seriousness you would give an acquisition.
The expensive lie: “I’m a good judge of people”
Every founder and CEO thinks they can spot talent. I have met plenty who can. I have also met plenty who were absolutely convinced they could—and kept hiring the same charming, high-energy, low-output operator in a different shirt.
The problem with a short interview is not merely that it is short. It is that it rewards the wrong capability: performing well in a short interview.
A candidate can rehearse a career narrative. They can memorise the company’s latest earnings call. They can produce a few anecdotes about resilience, teamwork and “leading through ambiguity.” God help us, they can even say they are “passionate about unlocking value.” None of that proves they can run a division, build trust with a hard team, tell you bad news early or make a clean decision when the numbers are ugly.
The larger the role, the more absurd it is to make a decision from one conversation. Yet businesses will spend months on product due diligence, legal terms and financial models, then hire a chief executive, sales leader or operating partner because the board had a good lunch and everyone liked their energy.
That is not leadership. That is negligence wearing nice shoes.
Ereño’s approach forces something valuable: repeated observation in different settings. A person who is credible in a structured career conversation, respectful during a meal and thoughtful when discussing motivations is giving you a more useful body of evidence than someone who nails a 45-minute Zoom call.
Not certainty. Evidence.
The context matters: Bupa is building, not merely defending
This is not management theatre from a business standing still. Bupa’s 2025 results showed customer growth across its insurance and health-provision operations: insurance customers rose 14% to 47.1 million, while health provision customers rose 6% to 20.7 million. The group’s strategy is built around connecting insurance with physical and digital care.
That creates a difficult leadership requirement. A senior hire cannot merely be good at one thing.
They need commercial judgement without treating healthcare as a spreadsheet. They need operating discipline without becoming a bottleneck. They need enough technical literacy to understand digital systems and enough humanity to lead people working in emotionally demanding environments. And they need to work across markets, functions and cultures without leaving a trail of political wreckage behind them.
That is precisely why the conventional interview is inadequate. The more complex the job, the less useful a polished answer becomes.
The best senior hires I have seen tend to display three things over time: clarity, ownership and range. Clarity means they can explain a hard problem plainly. Ownership means the word “I” does not become a hiding place for ego, but neither do they turn every failure into someone else’s fault. Range means they can shift from customers to numbers to people without becoming superficial in all three.
You do not discover those things by asking, “What is your greatest weakness?” That question should be retired and buried with corporate away-days.
The contrarian bit: copying the wine test would be lazy management
Let’s be blunt: judging a candidate because they do or do not order wine is a risky shortcut if you make it literal.
Someone may not drink for religious reasons, health reasons, medication, pregnancy, recovery, training or because they simply do not want wine at lunch. None of those things tells you they lack initiative. A candidate who feels pressure to drink alcohol to impress a prospective boss is not being tested for leadership; they are being asked to decode a social trap.
The sensible interpretation is broader. Ereño is trying to find out whether someone has independent judgement when the social script says, “Copy the boss.” Fair enough. But there are far better ways to test that.
Give candidates a real operating scenario with incomplete information. Ask them to choose between two unattractive options and explain what they would do in the first 48 hours. Present a customer complaint, a missed target, a regulatory risk or an underperforming executive. Then push back on their answer. See whether they defend a position with logic, revise it when better facts emerge, or fold at the first sign of resistance.
That tells you far more than their drink order.
A good hiring process should never be a collection of CEO quirks. It should be a deliberate machine for reducing false positives—the impressive candidate who should not get the job—and false negatives—the less polished candidate who would have been excellent.
What this means for you
If you run a business, stop treating senior hiring as an HR task you attend at the end. It is one of your core operating jobs.
Use this tomorrow:
1. Make every senior hiring process include at least three settings. Use a structured skills interview, an unstructured working session and a reference process that goes beyond the list of friendly names supplied by the candidate.
2. Write a scorecard before meeting anyone. List the five or six outcomes the person must deliver in the first 12 months. Then assess evidence against those outcomes. If you do not know what success looks like, you have no business hiring yet.
3. Test judgement with a live problem. Give the candidate a real but sanitised business issue. Ask for their diagnosis, priorities, trade-offs and first actions. Do not grade the answer like a school exam. Grade the quality of their thinking.
4. Ask for failures with receipts. “Tell me about a failure” is too easy. Ask what they decided, what warning signs they missed, what it cost, who told them they were wrong, and what they changed afterwards. Specificity is the tell.
5. Do proper references. Speak to former peers, direct reports and managers where possible—not only nominated referees. Ask one question that matters: “What kind of environment brings out this person’s best work, and where do they become difficult?”
6. Do not confuse confidence with courage. Confidence is often just good packaging. Courage is telling you the plan is wrong, the target is unrealistic or the customer is leaving before the dashboard catches up.
Ereño’s six-hour process is not valuable because it is long. It is valuable because it acknowledges a truth too many leaders avoid: people decisions compound faster than almost anything else in business.
Hire one wrong executive and you do not just lose their salary. You lose time, good staff, customer trust, management attention and usually a chunk of your own credibility.
Spend the extra hours upfront. It is cheaper than explaining to the board why the person with the brilliant interview has turned into a very expensive problem.