Job interview in Switzerland: the questions it opens with, and what each one is testing

The first conversation with HR is usually a screening call with a checklist behind it, and the person running it has to be able to tick every line before passing you on. That is why it opens on salary and availability rather than on your work: those are the items that disqualify, and there is no point spending twenty minutes on your achievements if the budget or the notice period rules you out anyway. It is not coldness. It is item two.

The items, roughly in the order they get covered: your motivation for this specific role and this specific employer; whether you fit the company — its size, its type, its way of working; whether you have done comparable work at a comparable organisation; your permit and availability; and your salary expectation. Language level is checked in passing, usually by switching into the language mid-conversation rather than by asking. The technical or professional depth comes later, with the people you would actually work with.

The practical consequence is that preparing only for "tell me about yourself" and your proudest project prepares you for the wrong half. Have a two-sentence answer ready for each checklist item, and make the motivation one specific enough that it could not be sent to another company — a generic motivation answer is the most common way a strong candidate fails a screening call, because it is the item HR is least able to tick on your behalf.

Look at what a Swiss advert commits to. Across 20K+ live adverts, 84% state the contract type and two thirds name a language they need. Not one states a salary figure. A few say the pay is competitive; none puts a number on it. So the salary conversation happens here in the first screening call or the first ten minutes of the first interview, and many application forms ask for a Lohnvorstellung before anyone has spoken to you.

The question is not testing your ambition. It is testing whether your number sits inside a range they have already fixed and will not tell you. So answer with a band, in gross annual terms, and name the convention: "I am expecting a gross annual salary between X and Y on thirteen monthly salaries, depending on the Pensum and what is included." Thirteen months is common but not universal, and if you do not name the basis the employer picks the cheaper reading.

Where the number comes from is the part people skip. Use a wage calculator built on the federal wage survey, put in canton, sector, age and function, and take the median for a comparable role as your floor. Then say the band without apology.

"When could you start?" arrives in the first five minutes and it is one of the few questions in a Swiss interview with a hard answer. Notice periods are set by the Code of Obligations unless the contract says otherwise: one month in the first year of service, two months from the second to the ninth year, three from the tenth, always to the end of a month. Contracts routinely fix three months for everyone. Whatever yours says, know the date it produces if you resigned tomorrow.

The employer is checking two things. The obvious one is fit with their plan: roughly one advert in five is less than a week old and about half are under a month, so a good share of employers are hiring for a gap that already exists. The second is whether you have thought this through. A candidate who says "probably around three months, I would have to check" has told the interviewer they have not yet decided to leave.

So the answer is one sentence: "My notice period is three months to the end of the month, so the earliest start is 1 January; if you need someone sooner I can ask about an early release, but I would not promise it." That last clause matters: offering to walk out of a current contract early reads worse here than it sounds. If you are between jobs, say "immediately" and mean it. If you are relocating, give the month you will be in the country with a permit in hand.

About one Swiss job title in four carries a workload percentage, and of those nearly three in five state a range rather than a fixed figure: 80–100%, 60–80%, 50–100%. A range means the employer has already decided they can live with less than full time, and the interview will ask where in that range you want to be. Candidates from abroad tend to hear it as a trick.

It is not. It is a scheduling and budget question, and it wants a number. "100%" is a complete answer. So is "80%, ideally with Friday off" — a normal thing to say in a Swiss interview, and nobody flinches. What does not work is "I am flexible", because flexible means the employer decides for you, and they will decide 100% and then be surprised when you ask for four days at offer stage.

One consequence to have in your head before you answer: salary, holiday and pension contributions all scale with the Pensum. An 80% role pays 80% of the full-time figure, and the salary band you gave ten minutes earlier is understood as the 100% number. If you want 80%, give the full-time band and name the Pensum in the same breath, so nobody does the arithmetic twice.

Two adverts in three name at least one language they need, and when they do, the level asked for is almost always a working level. Around three quarters of the language requirements in Swiss adverts ask for professional fluency, roughly a fifth for conversational, and only a sliver for basic. So the line on your CV that says "German B2" is a claim the employer has a business reason to verify, and the cheapest way to verify it is to ask the next question in German.

The switch usually comes without warning, three or four questions in, and lasts as long as it needs to. It is not checking grammar. It is checking whether you could take a customer call or sit in a team meeting in that language without everyone slowing down for you. Ten minutes of conversation is enough to tell.

The preparation is unglamorous: practise the salary, start-date and Pensum answers out loud in the second language, because those are the ones that will be asked in it. And do not overstate the level on the document: a C1 that turns out to be a B1 loses the interview in the first quarter of an hour, while an honest B1 held competently passes the test you set yourself.

One Swiss advert in five asks for two languages or more, and the pairing is not random. Nearly a quarter of adverts written in English also demand German; about a fifth of adverts written in French demand German, and a similar share English; a fifth of German-language adverts want English on top. An English advert from a Zurich employer is often a bilingual workplace advertising in the language the team writes in, and the interview reflects that: the hiring manager in English, HR in German, or the other way round.

So expect at least one interviewer to use the second language on the advert, and prepare the practical answers in both. It also settles what to do when you are unsure: open in the language of the advert, and if an interviewer switches, follow without comment.

For people applying from abroad: a German-language advert that also wants English is telling you the working language is German, and no interview polish changes that. Choose the adverts whose second language is the one you actually have.

Swiss employers issue a written reference at the end of every employment, and applicants attach them to the dossier. So the interviewer has already read what your last two employers wrote, in the coded phrasing Swiss references use, and a phrase that reads as lukewarm will be asked about: "Your reference says you performed to our satisfaction — what happened there?" Keep the answer short and factual. Say what the role was, what the circumstances were, and move on.

References who can be called are a separate thing. They are usually asked for after a second interview, with your consent, and the interviewer will ask whether they may contact your current employer. "Not before an offer" is a normal answer and nobody holds it against you. Have two names ready who know they might be called.

On register: Sie and vous until someone offers du or tu, which in a first interview they usually will not. Answers are concrete and understated. "I led the migration and it went live on schedule" is a strong sentence here; "I am extremely passionate about driving transformational change" makes a Swiss interviewer look at the clock. Then send a two-line thank-you the same day, in the language the interview was in, and nothing more until they come back to you.

Moving from a twenty-person startup into a five-thousand-person insurer reads as a risk here, and the reverse reads as a different one. The concern is not your ability but your tolerance: will someone used to deciding things in a corridor cope with a governance process, and will someone used to that process cope without one. Interviewers ask it indirectly — how decisions were made in your last role, how big your team was, who signed things off — and they are listening for whether their environment will feel normal to you.

The market shape explains why they can afford to care. Counted on 9 September 2026, our index carried 22,518 open adverts from 3,566 distinct employers, and 45% of those employers had exactly one advert open. Most Swiss hiring is a single role at a small organisation, where one wrong hire is felt immediately — and the ten largest advertisers accounted for only 17.4% of adverts, so the market is not concentrated enough for a candidate to rely on volume hiring. (Several of the largest advertisers are staffing agencies rather than end employers, so those shares describe adverts rather than workplaces.)

The answer that works is the explicit parallel. Rather than insisting you adapt to anything, name the match: same regulated industry, same team size, same customer type, same decision-making style. If you are genuinely crossing sizes, say so and say what you are looking for in the change — "I want the process, I was tired of improvising it" is a better answer than pretending the difference is not there, because the interviewer has already noticed it and is waiting to see whether you have.