Xing alternatives for the Swiss job search: the honest ranking

The Swiss job portals at a glance

Click an image for the full-size view. What each portal actually is stands beside it.

1. 

   1. SwissJobs.appOur app

   Over 21,000 open Swiss roles from ATS systems, company sites and LinkedIn in one place — and from any advert, straight into a CV, a motivation letter, a CV check and interview prep. The RAV job-search-efforts form fills itself from your application tracker. Free to use; the account is asked for at save.

   SwissJobs.app →

2. 

   2. jobs.ch

   The best-known board in German-speaking Switzerland and the largest index in the country. Owned by JobCloud AG — as are jobup.ch and JobScout24.

   jobs.ch →

3. 

   3. jobup.ch

   The standard in French-speaking Switzerland and the first place to look for the Romandie — but the same JobCloud AG as jobs.ch.

   jobup.ch →

4. 

   4. JobScout24

   A third brand from the same company. Searching all three to widen your search means searching one provider three times.

   JobScout24 →

5. 

   5. Indeed Switzerland

   The broadest aggregation, because Indeed also collects from other boards — at the cost of many duplicates of the same advert.

   Indeed Switzerland →

6. 

   6. LinkedIn Jobs

   The best reputation for English-speaking and international roles in Switzerland. Considerably thinner for trades, care and commercial roles.

   LinkedIn Jobs →

7. 

   7. jobagent.ch

   A meta-search across the Swiss job boards, "every job in Switzerland at a glance". Its strength is the Job-Abo: a saved search that mails you new adverts from every portal it covers. Salary calculator and application guides alongside.

   jobagent.ch →

8. 

   8. SwissDevJobs

   IT and software only, and thorough about it: "183 IT & Software developer jobs in Switzerland", filtered by technology (C#, Java, Python, DevOps, ML) rather than by industry. Publishes salary statistics and lists the companies that disclose their ranges. The site itself is in English.

   SwissDevJobs →

Xing and the six alternatives side by side

As at 6 September 2026. Details about the portals come from their own pages, ours from the code and from walking the flow. «not stated» means: not readable on the provider’s page without an account — not «does not exist».

What Xing’s own directory says about the Swiss market

At the foot of xing.com/jobs sit two lists that tell you more than any marketing line. The first, «Top-Standorte», names thirty-one cities: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Leipzig, Bremen, Dresden and on to Würzburg. Not one of them is in Switzerland. The second is a directory of forty-two occupation categories, from «Freelancer» to «Verwaltung»; two pairs repeat the same word, so we tested forty. Laid over the job titles in our open index, those forty categories name 17.8 per cent of the adverts. Inside the German-language adverts it is 19.5 per cent, inside the English-language ones 17.7, and inside the Italian-language ones 10.3.

What is absent matters more. There is no category for care and health — which, at 7.1 per cent of open adverts, is the largest single field on this count. None for construction and the building trades, another 4.5 per cent. None for retail, a further 2.0 per cent. There is, however, a category for «Flugbegleiter» (cabin crew) that matches no Swiss advert in the index at all, and one for «Hausmeister» that matches none either — the job here is called Hauswart or concierge, and under those words it accounts for 0.09 per cent. The same pattern runs through «Bürokauffrau»: no match, while the Swiss forms — kaufmännische Angestellte, Kauffrau, Sachbearbeiterin — reach 1.4 per cent. «Erzieher» matches exactly two adverts and «Mediengestalter» one; here the occupations are called Fachfrau Betreuung, Sozialpädagogin, Polygraf and Mediamatiker. «Werkstudent», a German student-employment status, appears in 0.06 per cent.

Two limits belong with that, because a directory is a shop window and not the search box. Xing’s search takes free text: you can type «Pflegefachfrau» into it even though no category carries the word. And if the check is widened from the title to the advert’s short description as well, the hit rate of those forty categories rises to 57.7 per cent. So this is a statement about the taxonomy, not about what the search can reach: the taxonomy was built for a different labour market. What a Swiss-built directory looks like was on jobs.ch the same day — eighteen occupation groups, the largest by their own count «Medizin / Pflege / Therapie», and a most-searched list that spells out Sachbearbeiter, Kauffrau, Detailhandel, Hauswart, Polymechaniker and Pflege. Two directories, one day, two different labour markets.

1. jobs.ch — the obvious replacement list

Verdict: the first choice if what you want is a Swiss list instead of a German one. jobs.ch is the board a German-speaking Swiss employer knows, and its directory names precisely the fields Xing’s list does not. We have not compared the two inventories and make no claim about which holds more; what can be checked is the ordering, and the ordering fits here.

One qualification that appears on no marketing page: the footer reads «© 2026 JobCloud AG», and the same company also runs jobup.ch and JobScout24. Clicking through all three to search more broadly means searching one provider three times. The interface runs in German, French and English, use is free for jobseekers, and for the French-speaking cantons jobup.ch — same house — is the established address.

2. LinkedIn — for the half Xing is genuinely good at

Verdict: the only serious replacement for being found. That is Xing’s real strength and it is not a small thing — a profile keeps working while you do nothing, and anyone changing employer without their current one hearing about it gets further with a profile than with any results list. Xing advertises exactly that: its own page says more than twenty thousand recruiters are waiting to hear from you.

Those people are mostly somewhere else, though. On Xing’s own recruiter showcase, read on 5 September 2026, there were twenty cards; on exactly one of them the employer is Swiss, namely Migros. The sixteen employer cards beside it are all German names. For a search here that means the profile that makes you visible belongs where Swiss recruiters look, and for commercial, technical and international roles that is LinkedIn. If English is your working language this is doubly true: the English-language corner of the Swiss market is where an international network is densest. We put the two networks side by side with figures for eleven Swiss cities at swissjobs.app/questions/xing-or-linkedin-switzerland. For care, the trades and retail a network alone is the weakest channel of the six — that is what the next two entries are for.

3. Employer and cantonal career pages

Verdict: not a channel for browsing, but the place the application lands anyway — and for small employers the only address there is. This is measurable from the application links stored with every advert in our index. In the part of the index Xing’s directory does not name — care, health, construction and the trades, together 11.6 per cent of open adverts — 64.1 per cent of application links point at a .ch address. Across everything else it is 33.1 per cent. The fields a German directory has no category for are, in other words, the most Swiss-hosted ones.

The cantons belong here too, as employers with portals of their own. Among the French-language adverts, 7.3 per cent of application links lead to a public-sector portal, the canton of Fribourg’s job portal first among them; across the whole index it is 1.2 per cent. Hospital, care home, school, administration: if that is your direction, a handful of bookmarked employer pages beats one more general portal.

4. Sector portals — the fields no network names

Verdict: the shortest route into one specialism, if you know which. Our application links let us name the four that genuinely carry work in Switzerland: physioswiss.ch with 0.73 per cent of open adverts, sozjobs.ch with 0.57, medicjobs.ch with 0.46 and apotheken-forum.ch with 0.24. Together 2.0 per cent of the index, and 3.4 per cent of the German-language adverts.

Those shares look small, and across the market as a whole they are. They are not spread evenly, though: they sit in physiotherapy, social work, nursing and pharmacy — the field Xing’s directory has no entry for and a general network covers most thinly. One portal for your own specialism is therefore often worth more than two more general lists, and setting it up once costs nothing. Note that these portals are run mostly in German, which is a real limit if you are working in English or French.

5. Job-Room — once you are registered with an RAV

Verdict: not an alternative in the sense of more choice, but the official part of your search. Job-Room is the portal of the public employment service, use is free, and the interface runs in German, French, Italian and English — the only one in this ranking that is also available in Italian. If you are registered, this portal belongs in your week regardless of where you eventually find the job.

What applies there is set by your RAV/ORP/URC and not by any tool: signing on, the suitability of work, and the form the proof of your job-search efforts has to take. What works alongside Job-Room, and how large its exclusive share actually is, we worked out at swissjobs.app/alternatives/job-room-alternatives — including why no private portal, ours included, takes the place of that proof.

6. SwissJobs.app — what we add, and what we do not

First what we are not. We have no network, no profiles and no feed: nobody gets found here, and the half Xing is good at we cannot do at all. We show no salary range on an advert either, while Xing does on many of its cards and states whether the figure is estimated or supplied by the company. And we do not claim to hold a wider selection than jobs.ch.

What does join up here is search and documents as one product. The advert text is already in the system, so the CV, the cover letter and the check against that specific vacancy are built without copy-paste; the export is PDF and Word, both without a watermark; the RAV job-search-efforts sheet fills itself from the application tracker. You can start without an account — you are asked for one when you save and from the second document. After that: a free account gives 5 documents a day and 10 per rolling week, then seven days of full access to try, then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, cancellable monthly.

Who should stay with Xing

If Germany or Austria is part of your search area, Xing is not a compromise but the right fit — those thirty-one cities in the directory are exactly the advantage then. The same goes at the border: living in Lörrach, Konstanz or Bregenz and keeping both sides open means both labour markets in one list. If you want to be found in German-speaking Switzerland, a maintained second profile does no harm either, and if you want a salary range before you click, Xing serves you better than we do — what its Swiss pages state about that we read through at swissjobs.app/questions/alternative-to-xing-for-job-hunting-in-switzerland.

The free tools stay useful as well: Xing runs a CV editor and a cover-letter editor, and for a clean PDF that is enough. What a Xing subscription costs you cannot see without an account — xing.com/premium redirects to the login; the memberships offered are Premium and ProJobs, operated by New Work SE. In short: a Xing profile costs nothing and can stay. For a search that happens in Switzerland, it just should not be the list you open every morning.