Interviews

How to answer the standard Swiss interview questions well: seven steps

Updated: 5 September 2026

In short

Every standard question takes the same structure: one sentence that answers it, one piece of evidence from your own work, one sentence tying both to this advert — sixty to ninety seconds in total. SECO lists the four themes the employer's questions come from on arbeit.swiss: your career so far including education and training, your abilities and personal qualities, your motivation for job hunting and for this application, and your suitability plus your professional goals. Two prepared answers per theme covers an interview.

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The part that separates a real answer from a rehearsed one is the third — the link back. The raw material for it sits in the advert, and how much of it there is depends on the language the advert is written in. In a count of the adverts open on our own index on 5 September 2026, 53.5 per cent of German-language postings state explicitly what the employer offers in return. English-language postings do so in 10.6 per cent: flexible or hybrid working in 7.5 per cent, professional development in 3.3, and holiday weeks, the 13th month's salary or the pension fund in 0.6 per cent. French-language postings sit at 16.3 per cent, Italian-language ones at 9.3.

That gap matters more than it looks, because English-language adverts are where people relocating to Switzerland start: they are 22.8 per cent of the texts we can read, and just over a quarter of them are IT and engineering roles. If you are answering an English advert, the employer has told you almost nothing about itself, so the motivation answer has to be built from the task and from ten minutes of research — not from the posting. The salary question follows its own rules and has its own guide; this one is about the questions that come before it.

How often the advert itself tells you what the employer offers, by advert language

Share of adverts open on our index on 5 September 2026 whose summarised text explicitly names further training, flexible or home-based working, holiday weeks, the 13th month's salary or the pension fund. Apprenticeships, internships and trainee programmes excluded. This is the material a good answer to «why us» is built from.

SECO names four themes for typical employer questions: career and training, abilities and personal qualities, motivation for the search and the application, suitability and professional goals.
Only 10.6 per cent of English-language Swiss adverts say what the employer offers, against 53.5 per cent of German-language ones — flexible working is the one thing they do mention, at 7.5 per cent.
Only 8.0 per cent of English-language adverts place the role in a team or department, the lowest of the four advert languages; French-language adverts do it in 27.7 per cent.
A specific number of years of experience appears in fewer than one advert text in ten. The interviewer has no fixed yardstick — your first ninety seconds set it.
An answer runs sixty to ninety seconds and has three parts: claim, evidence, link back. Without the evidence, all that is left is an adjective nobody can check.
Swiss dossiers carry Arbeitszeugnisse (employer references for every job) and a reference sheet, so what you claim in the room is verifiable — and is verified.
It is a CV, not a resume, and the interview is not a pitch: understatement backed by evidence reads as confidence here, not as weakness.

Step 1: Write down the four question families — and two answers under each

The standard questions are not a coaching invention. SECO sets them out on arbeit.swiss: prepare for questions about your professional career up to now, including education and training; about your personal abilities and qualities, where it names skills, character, ability to work in a team, self-perception and possibly leadership; about your motivation, worded as «Why are you looking for work? Why this job? Why at this company?»; and about your suitability and professional goals, worded as «Why should the company hire you?». The person across the table may well have prepared from the same page.

Put two answers under each family, not ten. Standard questions change their wording, not their subject: «What makes you stand out?», «Why should we take you?» and «Where do your strengths lie for this role?» belong to one family and take one answer with a different opening sentence. Learning thirty separate scripts leaves you in the room with thirty texts that each half-fit the question actually asked.

Two things stay off the sheet. Brainteasers, which are rare in Swiss first interviews and not worth the preparation time. And salary: it has its own unit, its own moment in the conversation and its own guide here. SECO gives only the frame for it — define your expectation in advance, find out what is normal for the industry and the position, stay realistic, and use your performance and qualifications as the basis.

Step 2: Give every answer the same three parts — claim, evidence, link

Part one is a single sentence that answers the question asked. Part two is evidence from your own work: the situation, what you personally did, the result, in three sentences and in the past tense. Part three ties both to this advert. Together that is sixty to ninety seconds — long enough to be finished, short enough not to become a presentation.

The evidence carries more weight in Switzerland than in most markets, for a structural reason. A Swiss application dossier contains an Arbeitszeugnis, a written employer reference, for every position you have held, and SECO notes that a separate sheet of reference contacts can also be handed over during the interview itself. Everything you say about yourself is, in principle, checkable — and where there is serious interest, it is checked. That is why a small claim with proof travels further here than a large claim without one.

Two failure modes are worth recognising in yourself. One stops after part one: «I'm very much a team player», then silence, because nothing follows that would show it. The other never reaches part three: a good, long story from a previous employer that leaves nobody knowing what it has to do with this role. If you are used to a US-style interview, the second is the trap — the practised narrative arc is fine, but here it has to land on the advert, not on you.

Step 3: Answer «tell me about yourself» in ninety seconds

This opens almost every interview and is the most commonly mishandled, because it sounds like a request for a biography. It is a framing question. Answer in three blocks: today — your function, the organisation and what you are responsible for, in two sentences; the path here — two previous positions with half a sentence each on why you moved; and why you responded to this advert. The third block is the one that matters and the one most often dropped.

The reason the frame has to come from you is visible in the adverts themselves: a specific number of years of experience appears in fewer than one text in ten, in English-language postings in 9.9 per cent. The interviewer usually has no number in mind to measure you against and is forming the picture during these ninety seconds. So state the scale you work at — how many people in the team, how many clients or sites you look after, what you are solely responsible for. In a Swiss room that is not boasting; it is the information that makes any judgement possible at all.

Leave out school, and leave out the personal block. Starting at your degree spends the ninety seconds arriving at the year you turned twenty-two. And while a short personal note is normal in some countries, a Swiss first interview keeps the self-introduction professional; personal ground is covered later, if it is covered at all. If you are relocating, use that space instead for one sentence on your permit status and your availability — otherwise it will simply be the first follow-up question.

Step 4: Build «why this job, why us» out of the advert and ten minutes of research

A good answer here holds two checkable things: one task from the advert you have done before, and one fact about the employer you looked up. SECO lists what to look up: the sector, the products or services, market position, business objectives, structure and the number of employees. Two of those, accurate, beat any general statement about how attractive the company is. For a hospital, a school or an administration, replace «market position» with catchment area and who runs it.

The second half of the material is meant to come from the posting — and in English it usually does not. Across English-language adverts, 7.5 per cent mention flexible or hybrid working, 3.3 per cent professional development and 0.6 per cent holiday weeks, the 13th month's salary or the pension fund; only 8.0 per cent place the role inside a named team or department, the lowest share of the four advert languages. German-language adverts name further training in 46.8 per cent of cases. So the English-reading candidate is systematically working with less, and the answer that sounds thin is usually a sourcing problem rather than a motivation problem.

Where the advert does say something, do not hand the offer back as your motivation — «you offer training, that matters to me» reads as taking. Convert it into an intention: «you write that you support further training; I want to take the federal exam within two years and then run the onboarding of new colleagues». Where the advert says nothing, build the link from the work: which part of the described job is the hard part, and what have you already done that resembles it? That question also gives you the closing question at the end of the interview.

Step 5: Answer «why are you leaving» facing forwards

Two sentences: one saying where you want to go, one saying what you are looking for in order to get there. Nothing evaluative about your current or last employer. This is not politeness. Switzerland is a small country with small industries, the person opposite may know the company, and your Arbeitszeugnis is already in the dossier. Criticism of a current employer is heard as a preview: this is how we would be talked about later.

The uncomfortable versions are answered shorter, not longer. A dismissal, a fixed-term contract that ended, a restructuring, a role that disappeared: one line with the fact, no justification, then the forward-looking sentence. «The position was cut in a reorganisation in spring. I am now deliberately looking for a role with direct client contact again» is a complete answer. Explaining invites questions, questions invite more explaining, and a thirty-second answer becomes five minutes.

If you are registered with an RAV — the regional employment centre — say so plainly; it is an ordinary status, not something to conceal. Registered jobseekers are entitled to personal counselling and to labour market measures which can include interview training; whether such a measure is approved in your case, and what counts as a documented job-search effort, is decided by your own RAV rather than by an employer or by this page. In the interview it is one sentence.

Step 6: Back «why you» and the self-assessment with evidence

SECO explicitly names self-perception as part of the questions on abilities and qualities, so being asked to place yourself — including downwards — is expected. The form that works is a comparison: take the requirements that appear twice in the advert text, give one example for two of them, then name yourself what you do not yet bring and what you are doing about it. That third half is what makes the first two believable.

«Of the four requirements you list I bring three; on project leadership I have worked inside projects rather than led them, and I started a course in spring» is a strong answer in a Swiss room. «I'm the perfect fit» is not, because it contains nothing the interviewer can write down — and what ends up in the notes is what you actually said, not how convinced you sounded. Interview panels here are usually two or three people, often HR plus the future line manager, and they compare notes afterwards against the requirement list.

If you are applying from abroad, two facts belong in this answer, one sentence each and without apology: where you stand on a permit or on recognition of your qualification, and your language level as a CEFR grade — B2, C1 — rather than «fluent». Both have to be established anyway, and stating them cleanly reads as preparation. One more register note: German-speaking Switzerland starts on «Sie», and in some industries switches to «du» after the greeting — the switch comes from the other side, not from you.

Step 7: Say every answer out loud against a clock — and cut three things

Speak each of your eight to ten answers once, timed. Anything over two minutes gets cut, and it gets cut from the front: the preamble — «that's a good question, let me think» — costs twenty seconds and adds nothing. The evidence in the middle stays whole. What you are hunting for while speaking is not phrasing but vocabulary: the words for your own function, your department and your daily work. In a second language those are exactly the words that go missing.

Three things get cut: the preamble, the superlatives, and the retelling of your CV. A fourth gets replaced — the vocabulary itself. Salary is Lohn, holiday is Ferien, your workload is a Pensum stated in per cent, and the document is a CV rather than a resume. An American or British candidate who talks about «vacation days» and «my resume» is understood perfectly well and still sounds like someone describing a different labour market.

The last thirty seconds of the interview belong to your own question, and it is strongest when it follows from something you said: if you named what you want to achieve in two years, ask what the role is measured on after six months. Afterwards, spend ten minutes noting which question made you stumble — you rewrite that one answer and only that one. After three interviews the standard questions really are standard, and preparation shrinks to the link back to the new advert.

The market figures come from our own count of the adverts open on our index on 5 September 2026. Apprenticeships, internships and trainee programmes are excluded by title (7.5 per cent of all rows); of the remaining adverts, 93.6 per cent have a summarised text, and only those are counted. Counting is done with fixed word lists in four languages: an advert counts as a mention when the summarised text names the thing explicitly — further training or development opportunities, flexible hours or home office, holiday weeks, the 13th month's salary, the pension fund or social benefits. A missing mention does not mean the employer does not offer it; the summary shortens. The gap between advert languages is still solid, because the German-language texts are not longer than the others — at 96.9 words on average they are shorter than the French-language ones at 117.5. Notes on the RAV and on pay are not legal advice; in an individual case your employment contract, any collective agreement and your own RAV decide.

Prepare answers for a specific Swiss advert

Sources

What our job index says about the Swiss market

Computed live from our own index, not quoted from a study. Shares only, as of today.

Language the advert is written in

Deutsch: 60%
English: 23%
Français: 13%
Italiano: 3%

Of adverts that state a language requirement, the share asking for

Deutsch: 70%
English: 43%
Français: 21%
Italiano: 3%

19% posted in the last 7 days · Largest markets: Zürich 18% · Bern 10% · Genève 5% · Basel 5%