Job interview questions in Switzerland follow the advert, not a top-20 list

This is the single widest gap I found, and it is the one that wastes the most preparation. The standard advice tells everyone to arrive with a story about leading a difficult team through a difficult quarter. For a Teamleiter role that is exactly right; it is the defining requirement of the job and it is written into nearly half the adverts.

For a developer, a nurse or a service technician, it is a story about something the employer never asked for. Worse, it eats the time you had for the thing they did ask for. Nursing adverts name professional experience five times as often as they name leadership.

There is a softer version of this that does travel: how you work with the people around you. But that is a different question with a different answer, and adverts phrase it differently too — as Teamfähigkeit, not Führung. If you are prepping a leadership answer, check the advert used the word first.

In the trained occupations the qualification is a gate, not a talking point. An EFZ, an HF diploma, a recognised equivalent — the advert names it because without it the application does not proceed. If you trained abroad, the question you should expect is about recognition, and you want that answer ready and specific rather than hopeful.

In nursing the demand shifts one level up: 28% of adverts name a higher-education qualification, HF or FH, rather than the apprenticeship route. Different document, same logic.

Then there is the other half of the market, where nobody asks. Software engineering adverts name a degree in 3% of cases and professional experience in 13%. That is not Swiss employers going soft on credentials — it is them testing the skill directly instead, which is a different interview and usually a longer one.

This is the requirement that most often gets underestimated by people moving between industries. Customer contact reads like a soft skill and gets prepared like one, in generalities. But in the occupations that name it, it is the job description, and the questions get specific fast: a difficult customer, a complaint you could not resolve, what you did when you were wrong.

Retail sits lower than people expect at 20%, and the reason is worth knowing. A handful of large chains write a big share of retail adverts and they lean on a different phrase — flexibility and resilience, over and over, far more than customer contact.

For administrative and technical roles the number drops to under one in ten, and the interview goes where the advert goes: accuracy, systems, reliability. If you are switching sectors, this is the chart to read before deciding which stories to bring.

It looks like a trivia question until you understand what sits behind it. In installation and field service the work is at customer sites, so the licence is not a nice-to-have, it is how you get to work. Adverts name it early and interviewers confirm it early.

The same requirement shows up for fitters at 9% and for service technicians and nurses at around 3% — spitex and mobile care need it for the same reason. In consulting and administrative roles it is effectively absent.

The practical version: if the advert names it, put it on the CV as its own line, with the category. Swiss adverts write Führerausweis Kategorie B and expect to see it back. If the advert does not name it, leave it off — a licence line on a developer CV is a line that could have said something else.

This is the requirement people most often get wrong in the direction that costs them the job. Where German is named in a customer-facing or trained-trade advert, it is named at a fluent or native level in nearly every case. There is no partial credit on that one: the interview will be in German and it will be the first thing tested, often before you sit down.

Software engineering is the genuine exception, and it is a big one. English is named in 55% of those adverts against German in 30%. That is why Zurich and Zug work as places to arrive without German if you write code, and why the same strategy fails in care work or retail.

French moves the same way in the other direction. A third of service-technician adverts name it, because that work sits where the customers are. If you are applying across the Röstigraben, read the advert's language before you read anything else in it.

Print the advert. Underline every requirement — the qualification, the languages and their level, the licence, the systems, whatever soft skill they chose to write down. Most adverts name only a handful, and that is the point: the short list is your interview, in the employer's own order of importance.

For each one, write the evidence rather than the adjective. Not reliable, but the handover you rebuilt so nothing was lost when a colleague left. Not customer-oriented, but the complaint you took and what you changed afterwards. Two minutes, out loud, in the language the advert was written in.

Then check what the advert did not say. Those are the questions you can safely not rehearse. Nobody has ever been rejected for failing to prepare an answer about leadership for a job that was never going to involve any.

One honest limit, because it changes how much weight to put on all of this: I counted what employers write down, not what they say in the room. The two are not identical. But a requirement an employer bothered to print is not one they forget to ask about.