Is there a free interview practice tool in Switzerland?

Free means three different things here

The first is publicly funded. Somebody else carries the cost — for labour market measures, the unemployment insurance — and nothing is billed to you. Entry is not a click but a status: registered, assessed, assigned. It is also the only one of the three where a human being listens to you rather than a text being generated for you.

The second is given away by a vendor. No money changes hands, but an account does, along with your CV and the advert you are chasing. The consideration is that you get to know the product. The question worth asking here is whether the output is yours: can you edit it, print it and walk away with it without leaving a card on file?

The third is free until a date. A trial is a deadline wearing the word free. It is perfectly usable when you are preparing one appointment and you write the exit date in your calendar. It becomes expensive when your search runs for two months and week three quietly turns into a subscription.

Knowing which shelf you are standing in changes the question. It is not what does this cost, but what do I have to satisfy for it to cost nothing: a status for the course, an account for the tool, a date for the trial.

The course through the RAV: free because the law says so

The decisive sentence sits in the ordinance rather than the act. Article 85a of the unemployment insurance ordinance says that the organiser of a measure may not charge participants course fees or contributions towards teaching material. So if an assigned course asks you for a fee at reception, that is not merely awkward, it is not allowed.

On top of that come expenses. Article 59cbis paragraph 3 of the act requires the insurance to reimburse participants for the proven and necessary costs of taking part. The ordinance is specific about travel: the cantonal authority grants second-class public transport tickets or season tickets within the country, and a private vehicle is reimbursed only exceptionally, where no public transport is available or using it cannot reasonably be expected. The contribution towards accommodation and meals at the place of the measure is also set by the cantonal authority.

More people lose money at the claiming stage than at the approval stage. The unemployment fund normally pays the reimbursement together with the daily allowance; participants who receive no daily allowance submit their receipts by the end of each month. Invoices for course contributions and for larger purchases of teaching material can be sent to the fund to be paid directly. And the deadline bites: a reimbursement not claimed within three months of the end of the month in which the cost arose is not paid at all. Where that would cause hardship, the fund may advance travel, accommodation and meal costs.

The conditions for a course are short and federal: unemployed or at risk of unemployment, registered with an RAV, the labour market situation has to call for the course, and the course has to improve your employability. Note that the federal list of measures does not carry an interview course as its own category — we set that out in our answer on the best interview training. The practical consequence for you is to ask for the name of the offering in your canton rather than for a category.

You do not have to be drawing benefit

This is the provision almost nobody asks about. Article 59d of the unemployment insurance act gives people who neither meet the contribution period nor are exempt from it, and who have not exhausted their entitlement, the right to the benefits under article 59cbis paragraph 3 for up to 260 days within a two-year period, provided they attend a training or employment measure on the basis of a decision by the competent authority and that measure makes them capable of taking up employment. Insurance and cantons split the cost equally.

There is a parallel route for people who still have a job but can see the end of it. Article 60 paragraph 2 names, alongside insured persons, those directly threatened by unemployment as able to claim under article 59cbis paragraph 3. The federal wording about practice is more cautious than the statute: for people not yet entitled to unemployment benefit, SECO says that a contribution towards the course costs may be possible. A contribution is a contribution — do not budget as though everything is covered.

In practice this collapses into one action: ask the RAV before you transfer a course fee to anyone. What matters is not your entitlement to money but the authority's decision on the measure. Those two are constantly confused, and the confusion costs people courses they could have had for nothing.

viamia: free from forty, but it is not interview practice

viamia is the federal and cantonal offer for people over forty, and the individual consultation is advertised as free. You contact the point of contact in your canton of residence, discuss your professional situation with a specialist, get an assessment of where you stand in the labour market and agree concrete next steps. The site runs in German, French and Italian.

One condition is easy to miss: you must not be entitled to comparable offers from the unemployment insurance, the disability insurance or social assistance. If you are registered with an RAV, your route is the RAV, not viamia. Where it is unclear, the cantonal viamia contact point settles it.

And the honest classification: viamia is a career stocktake, not a rehearsal for Tuesday. If you want to know whether your skills are still in demand and where you could move next, it is the right door. If you want to practise saying things out loud, it is not. Selling it as interview training would be convenient and wrong.

The free sparring partner you already have

Speaking out loud does not require a purchase. A general language model with a voice mode asks a question, listens and follows up; your phone records you. The difference between a useless round and a hard one is the instruction. What works: one question, wait, criticise my answer in three sentences, no compliments, then the next question — and at the end, name the three places where I dodged.

The language advantage is bigger than it looks from outside Switzerland. Among adverts whose language can be identified, 56.1 per cent are written in German, 27.2 per cent in English, 13.1 per cent in French and 2.2 per cent in Italian. A free general model switches between all four at no extra cost, while many paid interview products are built in one language and translate at the edges. Preparing a French-language interview through an English-language tool means rehearsing a language nobody in the room will speak.

The limits belong in the same paragraph. The model knows your career only if you paste it in. It guesses at notice periods, workload percentages and permits. And it praises too readily, because it is built to be pleasant. Use it for the drill, not for the facts, and check any claim it makes about the Swiss labour market against an official page.

Where the paywall sits: a twenty-minute test

Three checks are enough. First, generate a result and then try to get it out — print it, copy it, download it. A tool that takes payment only once the work is done is not free, it is deferred. Second, look for a date rather than a price: seven days free is a deadline. Third, see whether creating an account asks for a card. Where a card is on file, the free part ends by itself.

Here is our own answer, written down so you do not have to discover it. An account with an email address is required; a card is not. The cheatsheet for one advert, editing the boxes, the follow-up chat beside it, the earlier versions and printing all cost nothing. Premium is CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year with seven days up front, and you do not need it for the cheatsheet.

What is free nowhere: a person who listens and disagrees. There are two no-cost substitutes — someone in your circle who does a single round with you, and, if you are registered, the counsellor at your RAV. For technical interviews with live coding or system design, neither our tool nor a language model is a serious replacement.

Free and immediate against free and slow

The two free worlds run on different clocks, and that mismatch is why the question so often ends in disappointment. In our index, 13.8 per cent of active adverts are seven days old or less and another 22.6 per cent are between eight and fourteen days, so 36.5 per cent are under a fortnight and 62.2 per cent under a month. At the other end, 27.4 per cent are older than sixty days, and those are the ones where you do have time.

A course request has to be with the RAV at least ten days before the start, and the assessment comes before that. The free course is therefore an instrument for the search as a whole, not for the appointment on Tuesday. The sensible order is to file the request today because it pays off for the next applications, and to prepare the appointment in front of you with the instant free layer.

Then there is the fragmentation of the processes themselves. There are roughly eleven distinct application destinations per hundred adverts with us; the single largest takes 10.6 per cent, the twenty largest together 38.9 per cent, and 45.1 per cent of destinations carry exactly one advert. There is no procedure you learn once and recognise everywhere. Which is why the best free preparation remains the employer's own careers page: it often names the rounds, the people and the timeline, and it costs a quarter of an hour.

A free seven-day plan before the appointment

Days one and two: the advert and your CV side by side. For every requirement, one place in your own history that evidences it, with the year, the employer and the result. Whether you do that in a text document or in our cheatsheet changes nothing about the price; both are free. What stays empty stays empty — a gap is a task, not an invitation to invent.

Days three and four: two runs out loud, recorded. First the self-introduction, then five questions taken from the advert. Listen back only to the first ninety seconds; nearly everything you need to change is in there. If the conversation might happen in a second language, rehearse three minutes of it in that language.

Day five: one round with a person who asks follow-ups. Day six: your own questions for them, written out and derived from the employer's own pages. Day seven: leave it alone. And if you are registered with an RAV, the course request goes in on the first of those days — not for this interview, but for the ones after it.

Why voice rarely stays free

Every reply from a text chatbot costs its provider remarkably little. Conversing with a voice that asks, listens, transcribes and replies is typically billed by the minute. As a result, every product we read includes a usage limit: a daily allowance, a monthly cap, or a set number of weekly sessions. If a tool promises unlimited free voice practice, verify the limit well before your interview date, not after.

Even so, the free route is worth taking. To find out whether your answer to 'why are you leaving your current job?' lands within a minute or meanders on for three, a handful of attempts will do. Just know how many you have, and do not waste them on questions you have already mastered.

What SwissJobs.app gives you without paying

First, you enter the role and paste the job ad, then upload your CV and name up to five interview participants. Next, you choose the company size, as the interview changes with the number of employees. Then an AI voice conducts the interview in German, French, Italian or English, depending on the language of the job ad. Without registering, you see the first two questions and answer the first one.

The second question needs a free account. That gives you five questions on the day you register and five a month from then on. Each answer gets a score from 0 to 10, a short explanation, and a note on what a stronger answer would have included. That feedback is the part you cannot get from rehearsing alone in front of a mirror.

If you need more, there is a seven-day trial, then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, cancel any time. Even paid use has a ceiling: up to ten runs and 40 questions a month, 80 on the yearly plan. We print those limits because a price without them is half an answer.

The free voice you may already have on your phone

ChatGPT has a voice mode, and it is good. For the free plan OpenAI lists limited access to a smaller voice model and says the limits may change; usage is measured over a rolling 24-hour window. The Go plan gets three hours a day. For relaxed speaking practice in a second language, that is often all you need.

The catch is setup, not cost. You have to describe the role yourself, paste the advert and ask to be scored. It knows Swiss hiring habits only roughly, will not raise the notice period or your salary expectation unless told to, and gives you no consistent score you can compare against on the second attempt.

Google's Gemini Live works along similar lines. According to its help page it currently runs only in the Gemini app on a phone, not in the web version, and you must be at least 18. If you practise on your phone anyway, that costs you nothing.

Yoodli and other speaking-practice platforms

Yoodli markets interview prep and communication coaching and tells visitors to start free and upgrade later. Its individual plans are 8 and 20 US dollars a month billed annually; the cheaper one includes up to ten roleplays a week, and any session over 30 seconds counts as one. If your interviews will be in English at an international company in Zug, Basel or Geneva, it is a mature tool.

What platforms like this do not bring is the Swiss frame: the Arbeitszeugnis (the Swiss employer reference), your permit, a workload stated as a percentage, and a salary question that arrives in the very first interview. You can add all of that yourself, but only if you already know it belongs there.

When a person is worth paying for

No simulation can see you. Posture, eye contact, how you handle being interrupted: all of it goes unchecked, and all of it counts on the day. If you are aiming at a management role, coming back after a long gap, or have frozen in an interview before, a human who asks why is worth more than another round with a machine.

For scale: cvpics.ch charges CHF 230 for interview training, made up of about 35 minutes of simulation and about 35 minutes of feedback and coaching, by video call or in person in Thalwil near Zurich. If you are registered with the RAV, ask there first about an assigned course, which costs you nothing; the conditions are set out further up this page. And a friend who grills you for half an hour is free and often blunter than you expect.

How to spend the free questions well

Use the real advert, not a generic one. Do not spend free questions on the introduction you already have polished; spend them on the ones you would rather avoid, such as salary, a gap in your CV, or why you are leaving. Read the explanation after each answer, then give the same answer again the next day with the missing piece added.

If six answers leave you wanting more, a trial week is a more prudent step than a speculative monthly plan. And if what you lack is a person's reaction rather than more repetition, your money is better spent on a coach.