Baillie Gifford: Benedikt Wagner

It was my final round of interviews at Baillie Gifford. They were refreshingly different from the numerous interviews I had gone through before: no standard questions on teamwork, leadership, or related competencies that HR departments across the globe like to tick; no canned, embellished answers; and no corporate propaganda.

 

My interview was with Rob Baltzer from Fixed Income. I was a graduate research student at Oxford, so he enquired what “the metaphorical system of chess” was all about!

 

I went on to explain the evolutionary benefits of metaphor and relatedly, analogy. Imagine, I said, you were Pierre, a colonial officer from the Pyrenees, and in harsh winters, had accumulated experience in escaping from wolves: run as fast as you can, and climb the nearest tree.

Now you are in Africa, and have reason to suspect that a lion is trying to eat you. You have two options, I argued: to run away from the wolf as if it was a lion, which would not constitute very clean reasoning; after all, lions and wolves are very different animals. Alternatively, you could try to go through the differences and their implications methodically and scientifically, which does have a certain appeal... just that by then, you’d already be eaten.

 

“...by then, you’d already be eaten” were also the first words that James Anderson, then Chief Investment Officer, heard me say as he entered the room for the next interview.

 

A few months later, I started work at Baillie Gifford.

What else can I say?

 

Oh yes, I’ll tell you what the job actually involves. You start as an analyst. That means you look at individual companies whose stocks (or bonds) we can buy. To find out more, you look at the company’s annual reports and website; read news, reports and analyses about the company and the sector it operates in; and, where possible, meet management. This is essentially what everybody on the investment floor does, and you start doing it straight away (well, after an intensive two-week induction). So, a month or two after my arrival at Baillie Gifford, I wrote my first report – on three telecommunication companies, in essence the Polish, Czech and Hungarian equivalents of BT. We had a team discussion of these, and next thing I knew, my team leader told me we had bought £30 million worth of shares in the company I’d recommended!

And I haven’t even made up any of this. What’s not to like?