Baillie Gifford Interview: Passing the One-Way Video

Baillie Gifford's own early-careers manager, explaining a change to the graduate application on camera, does not reach for a euphemism. Asked why the firm changed a process that had barely moved in decades, Claire Stevens says it plainly: AI-written applications had driven a huge, repetitive increase in volume, mostly on the investment side, and the firm had to do something about it.

What it did was add a one-way video interview between the written application and the first live interview, precisely so a human being can still tell how a candidate actually thinks. Her own line on what stays the same is just as direct: there will still be no AI in the process.

That is the most current fact about the firm, and it sits on top of a much older one. Baillie Gifford is a Scottish partnership, not a listed company and not anyone's subsidiary, and its partners carry unlimited personal liability for what it owes.

It has spent more than a century getting paid to hold stakes in companies for years past the point most managers would have sold, including a stretch not long ago when that bet went badly wrong before it went spectacularly right.

The essentials on Baillie Gifford

Everything below is the part that table cannot hold: why a firm still owned by the people who run it behaves differently from almost everything else in this vertical, what a genuinely bad multi-year stretch did to its flagship trust, and what its process is testing for now that a written answer alone stopped telling anyone very much.

From a rubber-estate loan to Scotland's largest investment firm

The firm did not start as an asset manager. In December 1908, a young Scots rubber producer named Alastair Macgregor came home from Malaya with a cashflow problem: land bought and planted with rubber trees, and a long wait before the sap could be tapped and sold. The person who listened was the family solicitor, 27-year-old Carlyle Gifford, a partner at the legal firm Baillie & Gifford WS.

1908 to 1927: from a legal partnership to an investment firm

Gifford's own partner, Lieutenant Colonel Augustus Baillie, had sat on a rubber company's board since 1906 and knew the fortunes being made in the car-driven rubber boom. Their solution was to launch a trust in 1909, originally The Straits Mortgage and Trust Company, that offered mortgages secured against the rubber estates themselves, with a twist: the right to convert those mortgages into ordinary shares if the boom held.

It did, for a while. The trust diversified quickly into Cuban telegraphs, Chilean railways and American land, and in 1913 it took the name that has caused confusion ever since: The Scottish Mortgage and Trust Company.

Scottish Mortgage never made a mortgage on a Scottish house

That name is the vertical's sharpest example of a firm outrunning its own label. Once the trust's remit widened beyond rubber, it never went back to lending against property at all; today it is a global growth-equity trust holding stakes in companies such as Nvidia, Amazon and SpaceX, and it is now the largest investment trust in the UK.

The "mortgage" in the name is a fossil from a 1909 rubber-plantation financing structure, kept because renaming a century-old, famous trust is its own kind of risk.

By 1927 the founders had formed Baillie Gifford & Co specifically to manage the trusts independently of the legal practice that spawned them, and that is the entity that exists today. Assets under management tell the rest of the story in round numbers: £300 million in 1979, £3.5 billion by 1989, £16.2 billion by the end of the 1990s, over £55 billion by the 2007 centenary, and over £197 billion as at 30 June 2026.

An unlimited-liability partnership, and what that buys

Baillie Gifford's own leadership does not describe its ownership structure as a technicality. It states, in its own words, that the firm remains "the UK's only large-scale independent, unlimited-liability investment partnership," and explains exactly what that means in practice: the people who lead the firm also own it, they are personally liable without limit for what it owes, and they carry the financial and reputational consequences of the calls they make.

What unlimited liability changes about the day job

That structure is not decoration. A listed asset manager answers to public shareholders who read a quarterly update; a bank-owned arm answers to a parent with its own capital targets. Baillie Gifford answers to 54 partners who each stand to lose personally if the firm's judgment is wrong, and who split what it earns if that judgment is right.

Its own framing of this is direct: because there are no outside shareholders and no short-term targets to satisfy, the firm can focus on what it says matters most, which is the client's result over the long run, not the next reporting period.

Fifty-four partners, three of them running the place

Baillie Gifford counted 54 partners in April 2026, with an average tenure of more than 20 years, and leadership is shared rather than concentrated in one chief executive answering to a board of outsiders.

Campbell became a partner in 2012, thirteen years after joining as an investment manager in the Emerging Markets Equity Team; MacColl is himself an investment manager in the Global Alpha Team; Atack moved from the Emerging Markets Equity Team into the Clients Department before becoming Chief of Staff for Equities and then a managing partner.

All three built their careers inside the firm before being asked to help run it, which is a different pipeline into leadership than a bank promoting a division head from outside the investment floor.

Long-term growth investing, in the firm's own words

Ask Baillie Gifford what it is for, and its own materials do not hedge. It calls itself a house of "stock pickers who think differently," building bottom-up, benchmark-agnostic portfolios around individual companies with the potential to grow sustainably and reshape industries, rather than tracking an index or managing risk relative to one.

Seven years is the unit of measurement

The firm states its typical equity holding period plainly: seven years. That is long enough to sit through a product launch that flops, a management change, a recession, and still be holding the position when the thesis either plays out or doesn't.

One of its own investment managers, asked what "brave" means inside the firm, put it about as concretely as a corporate voice ever does: it means not selling something deeply out of fashion that the firm still believes in, even knowing clients will push back, and it means buying the immature company that might fail but could be the next Apple or Amazon.

That is a real philosophy with a real, checkable cost, and the firm does not get to claim the seven-year patience without also owning what patience occasionally looks like from the inside.

The stretch when the philosophy got expensive

Scottish Mortgage is the cleanest place to see what "long-term" costs, because Baillie Gifford publishes the trust's own numbers rather than a curated highlight reel.

The year growth broke

In the year to 30 June 2022, Scottish Mortgage's net asset value fell 38.8% and its share price fell 46.1%, against a benchmark, the FTSE All-World Index, that fell only 3.6% over the same twelve months. That is not a rounding difference; it is a trust built for growth getting run over by a rate-driven repricing of exactly the kind of company it exists to hold.

The recovery that followed was slow rather than immediate: NAV gained only 1.9% the following year against the benchmark's 11.7%, and it took until the year to June 2025 for Scottish Mortgage's NAV to beat the benchmark again.

10-year NAV return

+413.2%

10-year benchmark

+229.3%ref

Scottish Mortgage's own published performance. Ten years is the horizon the firm says it invests over, and on that horizon the trust nearly doubles its benchmark. The five-year picture is far worse, and the year-by-year table below shows exactly why. Source: Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, Performance.

The ten-year scoreboard looks nothing like the five-year one

Widen the window and the picture flips. Over ten years to 31 July 2026, Scottish Mortgage's NAV returned 413.2% against the benchmark's 229.3%, and its share price returned 370.2%. The same trust that barely grew its NAV over the five years that swallowed the 2022 crash still beat its benchmark by close to two to one over the full decade.

An activist hedge fund, two listed trusts, and a fight the partnership doesn't fully control

Not every recent event around Baillie Gifford is one it gets to decide alone. Since around 2024, the activist hedge fund Saba Capital, run by Boaz Weinstein, has built stakes of roughly a quarter to a third in two Baillie Gifford-managed, London-listed trusts, Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust and Edinburgh Worldwide Investment Trust, and has repeatedly pushed to change how both are run.

In December 2025, Saba blocked a proposed merger of the two trusts that would have offered shareholders a cash exit of up to 40%. Saba separately proposed to replace Baillie Gifford as Edinburgh Worldwide's manager through a tender offer; shareholders rejected that tender offer at a general meeting on 10 April 2026, and Baillie Gifford kept the mandate.

The practical point for a candidate is not that Baillie Gifford is under siege. It is that a firm built to hold positions for years spent 2025 and 2026 on the receiving end of a shareholder demanding faster answers at two of its highest-profile trusts, and a candidate who can discuss that tension has clearly done more than skim a careers page.

Why the application process just changed

Baillie Gifford has changed slowly across more than a century, but this one thing changed fast, for the cycle opening in September 2026, and the reason is worth hearing in the firm's own words rather than paraphrased into something softer. Asked directly why the process changed, Claire Stevens, the early-careers manager, does not talk about efficiency or scale. She talks about AI.

The volume problem, stated plainly

"AI has driven a huge increase in our application volumes," she says. "It's driven a lot of repetitive applications as well. Predominantly on the investment side but still a little increase on the tech side, and because of that we have had to change our process."

The fix was not to add an algorithm to filter the flood. It was to add a human step earlier: a short, one-way video interview, sitting between the initial written screen and the first live interview, built specifically to let the firm hear how a candidate actually thinks before committing more of its own people's time.

What replaced the old filter

The written side of the application shrank rather than grew. It used to ask for two answers to application questions; it now asks for one, alongside a CV capped at two pages. Nothing about a cover letter changed, because there was never a slot for one: the firm's FAQ states it will not read any additional attachments at all.

What did change is that a candidate who passes the written screen now has to answer, on camera, in their own voice, in a stage that did not exist before this cycle.

Four stages, and what each one is testing

The Investment Research Programme's own process page lays out four stages plainly, without hiding the video interview inside vaguer language.

No psychometric tests, no game-based assessments

Stage four is where most large peers in this vertical run some combination of numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning and situational-judgement testing. Baillie Gifford's own applicant page rules that out directly: "We don't use psychometric or game-based assessments. We focus on getting to know you and how you think."

That is a deliberate statement about what the firm believes actually predicts a good investor, and it is a genuinely unusual position to take in a vertical where almost everyone else outsources some part of the filter to a testing vendor.

What a Baillie Gifford application spares a candidate from preparing:

• A timed numerical reasoning test, of the kind most large asset managers run before a first interview
• A situational-judgement questionnaire scored against a model answer
• A gamified assessment measuring reaction time or pattern recognition
• Any requirement to write, or agonise over, a cover letter that will actually be read

Five years, three rotations, two qualifications

The Investment Research Programme is not a two-year scheme with a vague promise of permanence tacked on. Every graduate role is described as permanent from the day it starts, and the equity path runs five years end to end: three one-year rotations through different investment teams, followed by a two-year placement in another.

The IMC, the Investment Management Certificate, is compulsory in year one; CFA Level 1 is compulsory in year two; Levels 2 and 3 are optional, with flexible timing after that. The starting salary quoted on the programme page is £58,000, for a September 2027 start, and applications for the cycle open on 15 September 2026.

A report, not a pitch deck: what the research work is

The programme's own timeline is unusually candid about what fills the working week, and it is not what a candidate who has only watched finance films pictures. Across all five years, the constants are investment team work and report writing, self-directed learning, "how I invest" sessions with senior investors, access to a wide variety of external speakers and events, and ongoing book reviews and case studies with the firm's own investors.

A trainee is not sitting a mock stock pitch in a conference room once a quarter; they are producing written research on real companies from the first year, with a mentor and a rotation manager checking the thinking behind it rather than just the conclusion.

The teams a rotation might touch

• Long Term Global Growth, Global Alpha and Global Income — the equity teams behind Scottish Mortgage, the Scottish American Investment Company (SAINTS) and Monks
• Japan and US — geographic teams researching companies in those specific markets
• Positive Change — a thematic team built around sustainability-linked growth investing
• Private Companies — pre-IPO and privately held growth businesses rather than listed equities

A graduate will not rotate through every team on that list; the breadth is the point, not a guarantee of landing in any one of them. What ties the list together is the same asymmetric-risk belief from earlier: a researcher on any of these teams is being asked to find the handful of companies worth being wrong about the other ninety percent of the time for.

Edinburgh, not London

Every UK early-careers role at Baillie Gifford is based at its Edinburgh head office, and accepting one means relocating or being able to commute there, not to London. That is a genuine structural difference from most of the vertical's other big names, which cluster their graduate schemes around London, and it changes two things at once: the candidate pool the firm actually draws from, and the career a successful hire ends up building.

What that means for the career, not just the commute

A researcher who spends five years in Edinburgh is not doing the same job as a peer two hundred miles south with the same job title. Edinburgh is a smaller, denser financial community than London's, with fewer competing employers pulling talent sideways mid-career, which is part of why Baillie Gifford's own partners so often have tenures measured in decades rather than years.

A candidate weighing Baillie Gifford against a London-based peer is not just choosing a firm; they are choosing a city, and a different shape of career inside this vertical.

How to prepare, in order

1. Read the philosophy before the process. Everything the firm asks in an interview traces back to the seven-year holding period and the asymmetric-risk belief; a candidate who understands why the firm invests the way it does will answer questions about specific companies far better than one who has only memorised the stages.
2. Pick a company you would genuinely hold for a decade, and know why. Not a hot stock, and not a company chosen because it sounds impressive. The firm is testing for the reasoning, not the name.
3. Write your one application answer as if it will be read once, carefully, by a person. It will be. There is no cover letter to fall back on, and no algorithm to game.
4. Prepare for the video interview as a real interview, not a formality. It is short, but it exists specifically because the firm wants to hear how a candidate thinks in their own words, not a polished, AI-assisted script.
5. Bring a point of view to the online interview, and be ready to defend it. The firm has said plainly it is not looking for buzzwords or model answers; a considered opinion that can be challenged is worth more than a safe one that can't.
6. Know the last two years, not just the last two centuries. A candidate who can discuss the Saba Capital dispute at two of the firm's listed trusts, and why that is separate from the private partnership itself, sounds like someone who reads past the careers page.

What changed, and what never has

A firm that has run itself the same way since 1927 just changed its process for a reason it will say out loud: AI-written applications got too loud to filter with a written form alone, so a human conversation moved earlier.

Everything underneath that change is much older and much slower — a partnership where 54 people carry unlimited personal liability for what they decide, a seven-year holding period that cost Scottish Mortgage more than a third of its value in a single bad year before paying it back many times over across a decade, and a graduate scheme that still runs five years and pays for two professional qualifications along the way.

A candidate who can hold both of those facts at once, the firm that changed its interview this year and the firm that has barely changed anything else in a century, has understood Baillie Gifford better than one who has only read the careers page.