Selecting employees to lead a company is never an easy task and requires a lot of consideration. Yet for the current CEO of a major global media and entertainment business, Julio Bruno chose to take the matter into his own hands and approach the company first.
In October 2015, Julio Bruno was hired by Time Out Group as its executive chairman and has since gone on to take the company public and lead as its CEO. Typically companies select their leading business figures, however, for Bruno; he likes to say that he chose Time Out instead.
“I had left TripAdvisor in Boston a few months before, and I was thinking I wanted to go back to Europe, for personal reasons and I was talking to a lot of different companies,” Julio Bruno, Group CEO of Time Out Group, explains to CNBC’s “Life Hacks Live”.
“I saw that I had some opportunities and I was very humbled by it, and well I said ‘if people want to see me maybe I should be thinking about the company that I want to join’.”
“So I had a very, very short list and I was investigating and I wanted companies in media, travel, technology kind of thing – and Time Out was in my short list.”
“And I asked somebody in the headhunting world to introduce me to the owners without telling them why. I just wanted to talk in general, since they had a lot of companies.”
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Having secured his first meeting, at the end of it Bruno went on to enquire whether there was any company that the owners thought he’d be a nice fit for. Fortunately, the owners suggested that Time Out would complement his skills.
Being prepared and passionate about the company already, Bruno had his own strategy pitch prepared, detailing to the owners about what he would do if he worked for the Time Out Group.
It should come as no surprise that Bruno was invited back for a second and third meeting, which is when he disclosed his intentions for wanting to work for Time Out and once the owners found out, “of course, they loved it,” Bruno told CNBC.
“I’m very proud to say that (I pursued the job successfully), but it has taken me a long time in my career to get to a position of knowing what I want, knowing what are the skills and my shortcomings, and seeing how can I put that together as a package and offer it to a company.”
