Hiring interview (Einstellungsgespräch): which questions are coming — and how do I prepare?

The word you searched, and the word on the invitation

If you searched Einstellungsgespräch you searched for the right thing and will meet a different word here. The federal employment portal arbeit.swiss titles its section Bewerbungsgespräch. berufsberatung.ch, the joint portal of the cantonal careers services, writes that "the Vorstellungsgespräch, also referred to as Bewerbungsgespräch, is a mutual getting-to-know-each-other". Einstellungsgespräch appears on neither.

That matters in two small ways. Your invitation and your calendar entry will almost certainly say Vorstellungsgespräch, so recognise it. And the phrase in that official sentence — mutual — is not politeness. It is why the last stage of the interview belongs to you, and why arriving with no questions reads in Switzerland as a lack of preparation rather than as modesty.

The rest of the vocabulary follows the same pattern and is worth carrying into the room: Lohn rather than Gehalt for salary, Ferien rather than Urlaub for holiday, Pensum expressed as a percentage rather than "part-time", Stelleninserat for the job advert. You are not expected to pass as local. You are expected to have noticed.

Stage 1: arrival and "tell us about yourself"

The first stage is short and routinely underestimated. There is a greeting, usually a coffee, a sentence or two about your journey — and then the question that opens almost every interview: tell us something about yourself, or introduce yourself briefly.

The expected shape here is narrower than it sounds: two to three minutes, chronological, professional, ending on the advert. Not "I am a very structured person", but "I trained in A, then five years of B in the C field, and for the past two years D — and the part that interests me most is exactly what your advert lists as its second point." That last clause is the working one: it hands the conversation back and shows you read the text.

What does not belong here: your private life unless asked; a self-assessment with no evidence behind it; and a full re-narration of the CV that the person opposite you is holding. They have read your file. Your job is the interpretation, not the repetition.

One Swiss specific: whether the conversation runs on first-name terms is decided by the other side, usually in the greeting, and you follow. In technical firms and younger teams the switch happens within the first thirty seconds; in administration, fiduciary and finance roles the formal register holds until someone changes it explicitly.

Stage 2: career history — the questions your own file generates

SECO names the first topic as your "professional career up to now (including your education and training)". In practice that means your CV is walked top to bottom, and wherever something is not self-explanatory, a question follows.

So the questions in this stage are fully derivable from your own file. "What exactly did you do there?" comes at every station whose title is ambiguous. "Why did you move at that point?" comes at every stay under two years. "What happened here?" comes at every gap. "How did that go?" comes at every course you list.

The expected answer is factual and short: what the task was, what you did, what came of it. Judgements about former employers do not belong in it — not out of diplomacy, but because your Arbeitszeugnis, the Swiss employer reference, is very probably lying in front of the person asking. A story that claims a larger role than the reference describes produces the most uncomfortable follow-up question there is.

Prepare this stage mechanically: take your own CV, go through it line by line, and write one sentence for every station, every move and every gap. Wherever that sentence is hard to write, you have found the question that is coming.

Stage 3: motivation — "why this job, and why us?"

This one arrives in three parts, and arbeit.swiss lists them verbatim: "Why are you looking for work? Why this job? Why at this company?" Most candidates handle the first two adequately. The third is where interviews tip — and the reason is countable.

The same official page says what to research beforehand: the sector, the products or services, the market position, the business objectives, the structure and the number of employees. Six items. We counted how many of them the advert itself supplies. Among the English-language adverts in our index that carry a description, 67.2 per cent mention a goal, value or culture statement, 57.8 per cent a team or structure, 48.1 per cent a market position, 46.8 per cent a product or service, 12.2 per cent name the sector explicitly and 1.5 per cent give a number of employees.

The median English-language advert therefore supplies two of the six, and 43.8 per cent supply three or more. That is noticeably more generous than the German-language set, where the median is also two but market position appears in 17.9 per cent rather than 48.1. If you are applying to English-language postings in Switzerland, the advert usually does hand you something to say about the employer. What it almost never hands you is scale.

Which produces a twenty-minute preparation task: open the company website and look for precisely the items the advert left out. What do they sell, to whom, how big are they, who owns them, what did they announce most recently. One concrete sentence from that — "you opened the site in X this spring, and this role sits exactly at that seam" — carries the whole stage.

The counter-test is just as useful. If twenty minutes of research produce no sentence that fits this employer and no other, then your motivation is the role rather than the company, and you may say so. "The function was what decided it for me, and nothing I found about you argues against it" is an honest answer. Invented enthusiasm for a market position you cannot describe is not.

Stage 4: suitability and goals — "why you?"

SECO’s fourth block is "your suitability for the job and your professional goals", spelled out as three questions: why should the company hire you, do you want to develop professionally, what are your career plans.

The first is almost always misread as an invitation to sell yourself. In a Swiss interview it is not. The expected answer is a comparison: take the two or three requirements that stand at the top of the advert and place one checkable case beside each. Three sentences per requirement is enough — the situation, what you did, how it ended. It is the same shape expected for behavioural questions, and it is why four well-prepared examples carry most of an interview.

The question about personal qualities belongs here too; SECO names "skills, character, ability to work in a team, self-perception, possibly leadership skills". The part actually being tested in Switzerland is the self-perception: whether your description of yourself and the evidence for it line up. A strength without an example invites a follow-up, a weakness with nothing to offset it sounds unfinished, and those two things decide more than which quality you picked.

The career-plans question has a quiet second layer here: it is often asking about availability and staying power rather than ambition. An answer that names a realistic next step and keeps it inside this company is considerably stronger than one promising a leadership role somewhere in five years.

Stage 5: salary — the number is fixed before you arrive

arbeit.swiss calls the salary negotiation "often a challenging part of the interview" and gives exactly one instruction: define your salary expectations beforehand, and find out what is customary in that industry and position, for example from the professional association. It points to the national wage calculator for this.

The operative words are "beforehand". The salary-expectation question is not a negotiation but a data capture: it comes once, it comes quickly, and the answer is written down. Anyone who starts calculating in the room produces a number they cannot justify.

The shape expected: one figure, as an annual gross salary at a 100 per cent Pensum, plus one sentence on what it rests on. And one clarifying question before you commit — whether the figure is counted over twelve or thirteen monthly salaries. Both practices exist in Switzerland, the difference is a little over eight per cent, and asking is entirely normal here.

How that figure is built, which wording fits which situation, and what has to be in writing after a yes are a question of their own — it has its own page in this collection, as do the weaknesses question and behavioural questions. For this page, one line is enough: the number is fixed before you enter the building.

Stage 6: your own questions — and the sentence that closes

The last stage is yours, and it is the only one you fully steer. arbeit.swiss suggests the topics: more about the job itself, the place of work, the working conditions, the demands and expectations placed on staff and managers, and the company’s values.

Three to five questions is enough, and the useful ones are those the advert did not already answer. Asking about something that was in the text demonstrates the opposite of what you intended. Good candidates: what success looks like in the first months, whether the role is newly created or a replacement, how the team is composed and who the role reports to, how overtime is handled.

The final question is always the same one and is startlingly often forgotten: what happens next, and by when. That way you close on a date rather than on thanks, and you know from when following up is appropriate.

One rule stated explicitly on the adult careers portal and easily lost in the moment: do not decide in the room. Even a verbal offer across the table is answered with thanks and a period to consider it.

If you are arriving from outside Switzerland

The dossier is the first difference and it shapes the whole interview. A Swiss application expects Arbeitszeugnisse — written references issued by every previous employer — a photo is conventional rather than discouraged, language skills are stated as CEFR levels, workload is a Pensum in per cent, and two pages is the norm rather than a one-page resume. Because the interview follows the file, every one of those becomes a question.

Language levels are the requirement that is verifiable on the spot. State B2 and part of the conversation may well switch into that language. Nobody is trying to catch you out; it is simply the only claim in the dossier that can be checked in the room, so it gets checked.

The permit line is administrative, not awkward. If you are not yet resident, put your status into one sentence early: which permit you hold or need, and from when you could start. A clear sentence removes an uncertainty that otherwise works quietly against you.

Finally, register. Swiss interviews are evidence-oriented and understated. A phrasing that reads as confident in the United States or in Germany can land as loud here; a very reticent answer is not read as modest but as unprepared. The safe path between the two is always the same: a concrete case instead of an adjective.

For cross-border commuters there is one more: questions about your journey are not idle curiosity. They are about punctuality in winter, about on-call or shift duty, and about whether you plan to move. A calm, specific answer — route, duration, fallback when the traffic stops — closes the topic for the rest of the process.

The preparation that fits into one hour

Twenty minutes on the company: open the website and hunt for exactly the items the advert omitted — what they sell, to whom, how large they are, what they last announced. One sentence out of that carries the motivation stage, and it is the part of the preparation most people skip.

Twenty minutes on yourself: walk your CV line by line and note one sentence for every move, every gap and every course. Then pick four examples, one for each of the two or three requirements at the top of the advert — situation, what you did, result.

Ten minutes on the number: annual gross at 100 per cent, one sentence of justification, and the twelve-or-thirteen-months question ready to ask.

Ten minutes on the close: write down three to five questions the advert does not answer, and make the next step in the process the last of them. Then the logistics that should never become a topic — route and time buffer, which language the meeting runs in, a reference sheet in the folder.

With the advert in front of you, all of that can be done against the actual text rather than in general — which is what our interview preparation is built for: paste the posting and get the questions likely to come for that role and that employer, with an answer scaffold that hooks into your CV.