What is an alternative to a recruitment agency?
Updated:
In short
Seven channels replace a Swiss recruitment agency for a jobseeker: SwissJobs.app, Job-Room (the public employment service), the employer's own careers page, jobs.ch, LinkedIn, jobup.ch for the Geneva and Lausanne region, and the EURES network if you are moving from the EU or EFTA. We recommend SwissJobs.app for most readers, because you find the advert and tailor a CV to it in the same step. Use an agency instead for senior, IT and engineering roles, where much of the market moves through mandates that are never advertised at all. Checked 28 August 2026.
The Swiss job portals at a glance
Click an image for the full-size view. What each portal actually is stands beside it.
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.
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.
The standard in French-speaking Switzerland and the first place to look for the Romandie — but the same JobCloud AG as jobs.ch.
A third brand from the same company. Searching all three to widen your search means searching one provider three times.
The broadest aggregation, because Indeed also collects from other boards — at the cost of many duplicates of the same advert.
The best reputation for English-speaking and international roles in Switzerland. Considerably thinner for trades, care and commercial roles.
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.
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.
Jobs by profession, city or language
Type a profession, a city or a language, the page shows the adverts currently open for it.
By profession
- Consultant
- Project Manager
- Retail Sales
- Nurse
- Nursing & Care
- Administrative Assistant
- Account Manager
- Software Engineer
- Public Administration
- Architect
- Insurance
- Chef
71 more — narrow the search
By work type
One distinction decides which of these is even relevant. A Personalvermittler — a placement agency — introduces you to an employer who then hires you directly; a Temporärbüro (staffing agency) employs you itself and hires you out. Swiss law defines the first by the act of bringing jobseekers and employers together so they can conclude an employment contract, and requires a licence from the cantonal labour office for it. The employer normally pays. If an agency does charge you, the federal fee ordinance caps it: a registration fee of at most CHF 45, chargeable only once per placement mandate, and a commission of at most 5 per cent of your first gross annual salary, owed only once the introduction has actually produced a contract.
How this page was made: on 28 August 2026 we opened the jobseeker areas of jobs.ch, jobup.ch, Job-Room, arbeit.swiss, LinkedIn and the agencies Michael Page, Rocken and Pemsa, read the Recruitment Act on fedlex in its 1 January 2026 version and the fee ordinance in its 1 January 2014 version, and recalculated the shares in our own index of open Swiss adverts on the same day.
Share of open adverts on SwissJobs.app whose advertiser is a placement or staffing firm, calculated on 28 August 2026 from keywords in the job title. Across all adverts the figure is 12.0 per cent.
- Of the open adverts in our index, 12.0 per cent are posted by a placement or staffing firm and 88.0 per cent by the employer directly. Most of the advertised market is visible to you without registering with anybody.
- The largest single advertiser in our index is not an employer but an agency: Rocken® accounts for 7.9 per cent of all open adverts, against 3.2 per cent for Coop, the largest direct employer. Agencies do advertise in the open — signing with one is not the price of seeing their vacancies.
- Fewer than one per cent of the companies advertising in our index are agencies, and they carry 12.0 per cent of the adverts.
- Whether the agency route matters depends entirely on your field. Among adverts with IT titles, 39.5 per cent come from an agency; engineering titles 31.0 per cent; construction, technical and industrial roles 18.4 per cent. In retail it is 1.8 per cent and in nursing 7.7 per cent.
- English-language adverts are 19.7 per cent of our index — and just 0.1 per cent of them are posted by an agency. If you are searching in English, the agency channel is almost invisible to you, and it is not because the roles do not exist: agencies advertise in German and French.
- Job-Room's real advantage cannot be used from abroad. The five-working-day head start on vacancies reported under the Swiss vacancy notification duty requires registration, and registration requires an AGOV login, your AHV social security number and the eight-digit personal number issued by your RAV — services reserved for people registered as jobseekers at a cantonal RAV office.
- Under the Recruitment Act, any agreement that stops you approaching another agency is void, as is one that makes you pay the commission again if you later sign with the same employer without the agency's help. Paid placement also requires a written contract stating the services and the fee.
- You can check for yourself whether a firm is even licensed: the Confederation keeps a public register of authorised placement and staffing companies at avg-seco.admin.ch.
- Agency adverts are fresher but more repetitive: their median age in our index is eight days against 25 days for direct employer adverts, while 30.1 per cent of them repeat a title that appears more than once, against 24.8 per cent of the rest.
Paid application help and the free routes
| Service | Cost | When it is worth it | Free equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Application-writing service | CHF 150–500 | when a second language is the barrier | AI draft plus your own rewrite |
| Application coach | CHF 100–250/hour | when interviews fail, not documents | RAV counselling, interview practice |
| Recruitment agency | free to you | access to unadvertised roles | applying direct to target employers |
| Temp agency | free to you | a way in without local references | applying direct, more slowly |
| RAV counselling | free | mandatory meetings, courses, measures | — it already is the free option |
| When paying makes sense | — | when you can name the problem | otherwise try the free route first |
None of these is pointless — they solve different problems. The question is which problem you have: a document that does not convince, or a conversation that does not go well.
What a recruitment agency actually does for you
Start with the case against every alternative below. An agency does not sell adverts; it sells a standing relationship with employers. The company calls, the consultant goes through the people already on their books, and in that chain no public advert is ever created — which is why the market looks smaller on every job platform than it really is, ours included.
It also does three things no search box does. It knows what the role pays before you ask; it negotiates for you, because its own fee depends on the deal closing; and it phones the employer after your interview and tells you what went wrong. If you are searching while still employed, it also gives you discretion — your CV goes to one company rather than circulating.
Michael Page, to take a name a Swiss reader will recognise, runs offices in Geneva, Lausanne and Zurich, advertises permanent, temporary, interim and freelance roles and publishes its own 2026 salary guide; its site runs in German, French and English. Rocken® describes itself as recruiting built on intelligent matching and large talent pools. Pemsa is an agency for the technical building, electrical and industrial trades with branches as far south as Bellinzona, Locarno and Lugano. Read on 28 August 2026.
And the figure that puts all of it in proportion: 12.0 per cent of the open adverts in our index come from such a firm, 88.0 per cent from the employer directly. The advertised market belongs to the employers. The unadvertised one is the agency's argument, and it is a real one.
SwissJobs.app
What it is: a search over Swiss adverts with the application tools sitting next to it, in German, French, Italian and English. You search instead of describing yourself to a consultant, and you build a CV tailored to the advert you found without copying the posting text anywhere.
What it costs: searching, filtering and the daily e-mail alert are free and need no account. The application tools — a CV per advert, a fit check against a specific posting, a motivation letter — cost CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, with the first seven days free.
Who it suits: people applying continuously who want to control which company sees their documents, and anyone who needs a Swiss dossier rather than an international resume — the Arbeitszeugnis references, the work-permit line, language levels as CEFR grades, and the Pensum stated as a percentage.
Where it stops: we do not employ you, we do not introduce you and we never phone anyone on your behalf. Nobody here asks the employer why you were rejected, and nobody negotiates your salary. The mandates that are never advertised do not reach us either — that is the one thing an agency genuinely does better.
Job-Room and the RAV
What it is: the public employment service — the same trade as a private agency, run by the state. Your RAV adviser works through a career analysis with you, reviews your search strategy and places actively; arbeit.swiss calls Job-Room «the official job platform of the public employment service and the largest job board in Switzerland».
What it costs: nothing. And the counselling does not stop with the benefit: arbeit.swiss states that RAV counselling and placement remain available even after your unemployment benefit has run out.
Who it suits: people who are unemployed or about to be, and who live in Switzerland. Registered jobseekers see vacancies reported under the notification duty five working days before anyone else.
Where it stops: this is the entry on the list that is genuinely unusable from abroad. Registration needs an AGOV login, an AHV number and a personal number your RAV issues, and the services are reserved for people registered at a cantonal RAV. Browsing the adverts works from anywhere; the head start does not. And if you are registered, one point where money is at stake: your job-search efforts have to be recorded in Job-Room or on your cantonal form to count. What you find here is easier to search — it does not replace that entry.
The employer's own careers page
What it is: the direct route. You pick twenty or thirty employers you would actually work for and check their own pages, or write to them without an advert at all. For a speculative application this is the only channel that exists.
What it costs: nothing but your time, and time is the real price — every careers page has its own form, its own account and its own way of misreading your CV.
Who it suits: anyone who already knows where they want to work: a specific hospital, a cantonal administration, one manufacturer. In our index 88.0 per cent of adverts come from those employers themselves, so waiting for an agency to bring you the same role is the detour.
Where it stops: you only see what one employer happens to be advertising, and never learn what you missed. All the administration is yours, and without a list of where you applied you lose the thread within a fortnight.
jobs.ch
What it is: the largest private job board in German-speaking Switzerland, which calls itself «the leading Swiss job board» on its own homepage. Alongside the search it runs a salary calculator, a Job Coach and «Spotted by jobs.ch», a talent pool where you share your profile and let companies approach you — the feature closest to what an agency does.
What it costs: free for jobseekers, including the account, job alerts and the shortlist.
Who it suits: anyone searching in German-speaking Switzerland who wants reach, and anyone who would rather be found than sign with an agency.
Where it stops: the language switcher offers German, French and English — no Italian, which is a real gap for Ticino. And a profile in a talent pool is not an adviser: whoever wants to write to you does, and whoever should does not.
What it is: the network the agencies themselves search. A complete profile with the «open to work» signal makes you visible to exactly the people who would otherwise reach you through a mandate, with no contract in between.
What it costs: free. Premium is a subscription and is not needed to be found.
Who it suits: senior, IT, engineering and international roles — the same fields where the agency share in our index peaks at 39.5 and 31.0 per cent. It is also the strongest channel if you are applying to Switzerland in English.
Where it stops: for retail, hospitality, the trades and much of healthcare, LinkedIn is thin in Switzerland; in retail the agency share of our adverts is 1.8 per cent and almost everything runs through adverts instead. And an approach on LinkedIn is not vetted — an agency writing to you has a specific mandate, a recruiter in your inbox may just be collecting profiles.
jobup.ch
What it is: the job board for French-speaking Switzerland, run under the same roof as jobs.ch, with its own salary section and Job Coach. If your search is Geneva, Vaud, Neuchâtel or Fribourg — where a large share of English-speaking arrivals land — this is the local board, not jobs.ch.
What it costs: free for jobseekers.
Who it suits: anyone targeting the Lake Geneva region, and cross-border commuters from France.
Where it stops: the site runs in French and English only, and its reach outside the Romandie is limited. It is a regional board and does not pretend otherwise.
EURES
What it is: the cooperation network of the public employment services of the EU and EFTA, which Switzerland takes part in. Its portal carries vacancies from all member states, information on living and working conditions per country, and access to more than a thousand EURES advisers.
What it costs: free, and it is a public service rather than a business.
Who it suits: people moving between an EU or EFTA country and Switzerland who need the practical layer around the job — permits, social insurance, what a contract in the destination country means. That is the part an international recruiter rarely explains and a Swiss agency assumes you know.
Where it stops: arbeit.swiss says it plainly — «EURES Switzerland doesn't place people in jobs itself». It is an information and vacancy network, not a consultant with your file on their desk. It also carries an explicit warning worth repeating: employers do not normally ask for advance payment for administrative formalities, so do not pay anyone up front.
Who should pick what
For most people asking this question, SwissJobs.app is the right first step: you see the 88.0 per cent of the advertised market that comes straight from employers, and you write a CV shaped to each advert rather than one generic file. If you are registered with a RAV, Job-Room is not optional alongside it — that is where your benefit entitlement is documented.
Stay with an agency if you are looking at senior, IT or engineering roles, if you need to move discreetly while employed, or if you want someone negotiating the salary for you. Those are exactly the fields where the agency share of advertised roles runs between 31.0 and 39.5 per cent in our index, which is a fair signal that the unadvertised share there is large too.
Whichever route you take, three practical checks: look the firm up in the federal register of licensed agencies, never sign a placement contract that does not state the services and the fee in writing, and pay nothing above CHF 45 in advance. The rest of the commission is only owed once you actually hold a contract.
Shares are calculated from the open adverts on SwissJobs.app on 28 August 2026. An advert counts as agency-posted when the advertiser identifies itself in its name as a placement, recruitment or staffing firm, or is one of the named houses; agencies advertising under a client's name are not captured, so the true share is likely somewhat higher. Fields are grouped by keywords in the job title and overlap in places. Legal points come from the Federal Act on Employment Services and the Hiring of Services in its 1 January 2026 version and from the associated fee ordinance in its 1 January 2014 version; the German and French texts are binding, the English descriptions here are ours. Details on the RAV, Job-Room, registration and EURES come from arbeit.swiss; provider details come from their own websites, read on 28 August 2026.
Sources
- Federal Act on Employment Services and the Hiring of Services (AVG/LSE), Art. 2, 7, 8 and 9
- Fee ordinance to the Act — registration fee of at most 45 francs, commission of at most 5 per cent
- Federal register of licensed placement and staffing companies
- arbeit.swiss — jobseekers, counselling and placement
- arbeit.swiss — registration and the five-working-day head start
- arbeit.swiss — EURES, professional mobility in the EU/EFTA
- Job-Room — the official job platform
- jobs.ch — homepage, salary calculator, Job Coach and talent pool
- jobup.ch — the job board for French-speaking Switzerland
- LinkedIn Jobs
- Michael Page Switzerland — offices and salary guide
- Rocken® — vacancies and self-description
- Pemsa — agency for construction, electrical and industrial trades
Related questions
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%