Which interview questions are illegal in Switzerland?

A purpose test, not a list of banned words

People arriving from the United Kingdom or the United States often look for the Swiss equivalent of a protected-characteristics list. There is no such list for interviews. There is a purpose test, and it is short. Art. 328b CO permits an employer to handle data concerning an employee «only to the extent that such data concern the employee's suitability for his job or are necessary for the performance of the employment contract», and refers everything else to the Data Protection Act.

Because the test is about purpose rather than topic, the same words can be lawful in one interview and unlawful in the next. «Do you hold a category B driving licence?» is a question about the work when the role drives, and an idle intrusion when it does not. «Which language do you work in, and at what level?» is a job requirement; «what is your mother tongue?» reaches for origin. Nothing in the wording tells you which side of the line you are on. The advert does.

The Data Protection Act supplies the machinery behind the test. Art. 6 para. 3 requires that personal data be «collected only for a specific purpose that is evident to the data subject», and para. 4 requires destruction or anonymisation once the data are no longer needed for that purpose. Art. 5 let. c lists what counts as sensitive: data on religious, ideological, political or trade-union views or activities, on health, the intimate sphere or racial or ethnic origin, genetic data, biometric data that uniquely identify a person, data on administrative and criminal proceedings or sanctions, and data on social assistance measures. Almost every question that feels intrusive in an interview lands in one of those buckets.

One point catches employers out. Art. 362 para. 1 CO makes Art. 328b mandatory in the employee's favour, so consent cannot enlarge it. An applicant who signs a form agreeing to a background enquiry has not thereby made an irrelevant background enquiry lawful.

The Commissioner's own example, measured against the market

The Commissioner explains the convictions rule with a cashier: for that job, an employer may ask whether the applicant has been convicted of dishonesty. It is a good example precisely because it is so specific — and it is worth knowing how much of a hiring market it actually covers.

We counted the adverts open on SwissJobs.app on 23 August 2026. Cashier-type roles are 0.1 per cent of them. Roles that work regularly with people the law treats as particularly vulnerable — nursing, care, childcare, teaching and social pedagogy — come to 3.9 per cent between them. For the remaining nineteen adverts in twenty, a general question about convictions has nothing in the job description to attach itself to.

The other anchors are similarly scarce. A driving licence is named in 2.1 per cent of adverts that carry a description. Shift, night or weekend duty is named in 0.9 per cent overall — but in 4.8 per cent of care adverts, where a question about roster availability plainly belongs to the work. That contrast is the whole rule in one figure: availability for a named roster is a job question, while how you arrange childcare around it is not, even though both aim at the same answer.

Language is the one place where the anchor is almost always present. Of all open adverts, 72.7 per cent name at least one required language together with a level, and of every language requirement stated, 83.8 per cent ask for a professional level, 11.8 per cent for conversational, 1.4 per cent for basic and only 2.9 per cent for a native level. Of the four languages this market advertises in, English is the least likely to be phrased as native at all: 1.9 per cent of English requirements, against 2.5 per cent for German, 5.6 per cent for French and 7.8 per cent for Italian. Employers overwhelmingly describe a skill. An interviewer who asks about your mother tongue instead is asking for something the advert did not.

Pregnancy, family situation and the Gender Equality Act

Two statutes overlap on the pregnancy question. Under data protection law it is a health question. Under the Gender Equality Act it is a sex-discrimination question, and Art. 3 para. 2 of that Act names recruitment first among the situations covered by the ban.

The Commissioner's guide is unusually direct here: asking a candidate about a possible pregnancy is discriminatory against women and therefore inadmissible, unless there is an objective risk to the health of the mother or the child, or unless the pregnancy prevents the work from being done at all — the examples given are modelling and dancing. That is the true width of the exception.

What follows an appointment is handled by the Employment Act rather than by the interview. Art. 35 para. 1 requires employers to organise the work of pregnant women and nursing mothers so that their health and the child's health are not impaired. Art. 35a para. 1 provides that pregnant and nursing women may only be employed with their consent, and para. 4 forbids employing a pregnant woman between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. from the eighth week before the birth. Those protections apply on their own terms, whatever was or was not said in an interview.

The remedy for a discriminatory refusal to hire is deliberately narrow. Art. 5 para. 2 gives the person concerned a claim to compensation only — never to the job. Art. 5 para. 4 caps that compensation at the equivalent of three months' salary, and provides that the total may not exceed that amount even where several people claim over the same post. Art. 8 para. 1 lets a rejected applicant demand written reasons, and para. 2 extinguishes the claim unless proceedings are brought within three months of being told of the rejection.

There is also a gap that rarely gets mentioned. Art. 6 of the Act relieves the burden of proof — discrimination is presumed once credibly demonstrated — for the allocation of duties, working conditions, pay, training, promotion and dismissal. Recruitment is not on that list, so a discriminatory refusal to hire is proved under the ordinary rules.

Tests, assessment centres and questionnaires

Inadmissible questions do not only arrive out loud. They arrive as personality inventories, as assessment-centre exercises, as forms. The Commissioner's guidance treats them together: graphological reports, psychological aptitude tests, assessment-centre evaluations, personality tests and biological questionnaires are permitted only where they serve the purpose pursued and are administered and evaluated by specialists.

Two further conditions sit alongside. Selection tests may be run only with the applicant's consent, and the applicant must be able to understand what the method is meant to establish and how it relates to the training or the work — otherwise the choice to take part is not a real choice. And the procedure itself must not violate personality rights, for instance through questions touching the intimate sphere, personal opinions or health. A personality inventory that asks about political leanings is the same inadmissible question as one asked across a table, only printed.

Graphology carries its own rule that is almost never honoured in practice: where a handwriting report is to be produced, the job advert must say so expressly, and a handwritten letter that happens to be in the file may not simply be used for it. Only an advance warning leaves room to refuse.

Health questionnaires for a daily-allowance insurer are a separate case with a clean boundary. Applicants often have to complete them so the insurer can assess the terms of cover. On the employer's side the guidance is one sentence: the employer may not have access to those documents.

What happens when the question comes anyway

Swiss guidance accepts that few people can refuse a question mid-interview without paying for it, and draws an unusual conclusion. Applicants need not answer questions unconnected to the advertised post; and because refusing is generally not possible in practice, they even have the right to answer inaccurately in order to avoid being disadvantaged — the Commissioner's guide calls it a right to lie in legitimate self-defence.

That has a concrete contract-law consequence, stated in the same passage: an inaccurate answer to an impermissible question does not allow the contract to be rescinded for wilful deception under Art. 28 para. 1 CO. The converse does not hold. Where the question is admissible — that is, connected to the job — the applicant owes truthful information, and a false answer there stands on very different ground.

Nothing in this depends on how uncomfortable the question felt. It depends on the post. «Can you work weekends?» belongs to the job wherever the roster contains weekends. «Do you have small children?» is the same intention without the job attached, and it engages Art. 3 of the Gender Equality Act because it fastens on family situation.

Swiss private employment law is federal law: the Code of Obligations, the Gender Equality Act and the Data Protection Act read the same in every canton, and the Gender Equality Act also covers public-law employment at federal, cantonal and communal level. What differs by canton is the route. Each canton runs a conciliation body under the Gender Equality Act, and cantonal equality offices, unions and free legal advice centres go different distances in what they will take on. This page explains the rule; it is not legal advice on a particular case, and the conciliation body in your canton is where a particular case belongs.