SwissJobs.app or ostjob.ch — which one for a job search in eastern Switzerland?

SwissJobs.app and ostjob.ch side by side — checked 4 September 2026

Everything about ostjob.ch was read on 4 September 2026 from its own public job list and its own pages; our figures come from the code and from live requests the same day. Nothing in this table is an estimate — where a value could not be read, the row says so.

What it costs — for jobseekers and for employers

Our prices come from the code; theirs from the rate card their "Preise & Leistungen" page serves. Prices change — read them yourself before paying.

How deep the regional list really is in its own region

ostjob.ch calls itself the leading job portal for eastern Switzerland, and for the core of the region that holds. On 4 September 2026 we counted its entire open list — every entry it publishes, not a sample of the first result pages. Excluding apprenticeships and internships, just under five thousand nine hundred adverts remain. In canton St. Gallen it carries about three times our stock, in Thurgau close to three times, in Appenzell several times over.

But eastern Switzerland is seven cantons, not one market, and in three of them the ratio flips. We hold more open adverts in Graubünden, about five times as many in Schaffhausen, and slightly more in Glarus. The reason is structural: ostjob.ch belongs to CH Media Classifieds, which runs a separate portal for Graubünden and Liechtenstein, while Schaffhausen sits north of the Rhine and falls outside every one of those regional cuts.

So the practical rule is geographic rather than tribal. Searching St. Gallen or Thurgau without opening ostjob.ch costs you real listings. Searching Schaffhausen only on ostjob.ch costs you considerably more.

A quarter of the eastern board is not in eastern Switzerland

Regional boards get judged by their name rather than their contents. On ostjob.ch every advert carries a canton, so the contents can simply be counted. 74.9 per cent sit in one of the seven eastern cantons. The other 25.1 per cent sit entirely outside them: 7.1 per cent in canton Zurich, 3.9 per cent in the Principality of Liechtenstein, 2.6 per cent in Solothurn, 2.0 per cent each in Aargau and in Austrian Vorarlberg, plus Basel-Stadt, Lucerne, Schwyz, Bern and Valais.

This is not dishonesty; it is how their network runs. One advert can appear on ostjob.ch, on westjob.at for Vorarlberg and on nicejob.de for southern Germany at once, and their rate card sells exactly that bundle. It still matters for a search. If you read the counter on their home page as a measure of the eastern Swiss labour market, you are reading it about a quarter too high.

The Liechtenstein share is the one worth pausing on: 3.9 per cent of the adverts on this eastern-Swiss board are in the Principality, which is neither part of Switzerland nor of the EU and sets its own immigration rules. Clicking one of those postings from Switzerland means applying abroad, twenty minutes from Buchs or not, and which authorisation you would need is a question for the Liechtenstein authorities rather than for a cantonal migration office.

Can you work in eastern Switzerland without German?

This is the question that decides the comparison for most English-speaking readers, and it is answerable from the adverts rather than from opinion. We looked at every open advert we hold in the seven eastern cantons and read the language requirements out of them. Two thirds state a requirement at all. Of those, 91.9 per cent name German — and 62.6 per cent name German and nothing else.

English appears in 33.2 per cent, French in 3.4, Italian in 3.0 and Romansh in 1.1 per cent, the last almost entirely in Graubünden, where it is a national language with its own schools and administration. For contrast, in canton Zurich only 38.0 per cent of adverts name German alone and English appears in 59.7 per cent. Eastern Switzerland is the more German-speaking of the two labour markets by a wide margin.

That cuts both ways in this comparison. It means a German-only interface costs an eastern job seeker less than it would in Zurich — most of the adverts are in German anyway. It also means that if you are arriving without German, the honest answer is not "use the other site", it is that roughly two adverts in three will be closed to you until your German improves, and the third one is where you should be looking. Our language filter exists for exactly that search; ostjob.ch has no equivalent, because its whole board is German.

The tail of the list: what has been open for more than six months

The usual expectation of a regional board is that it moves more slowly than a national one. Measured, that is false. 20.6 per cent of adverts on ostjob.ch are at most seven days old against 22.9 per cent of ours — effectively level — and their median advert is younger than ours, about 24 days against 30. On freshness at the front of the list, they are not behind.

The difference is at the other end. 14.3 per cent of their open adverts were first published more than six months ago and 7.0 per cent more than a year ago; the oldest was first published in February 2015. Our comparable figures are 1.5 and 0.4 per cent. A long tail forms wherever adverts run until somebody cancels them, and on an annual package that is already paid for, leaving one up costs nothing.

In fairness: an old first-publication date does not prove the role is filled. ostjob.ch carries a second date for the last update, and that sits at a median of about twelve days, so part of that old stock is being maintained. The only way to be sure is to ask — which is precisely the work a date is supposed to save you.

What an advert costs there, and why that shapes the list

The ostjob.ch rate card is public, and it explains the board better than any description. A single advert for eastern Switzerland costs CHF 540 for thirty days, excluding VAT. Having their staff enter it for you adds CHF 80. An annual package runs CHF 2100 for companies under twenty staff, CHF 4200 above that, and CHF 6600 if you want your logo permanently on the home page.

On top sits a promotion layer: a "Job-Pin" that lifts an advert to the top of the result list and onto the home page for CHF 200 to CHF 390, a social-media push for CHF 990, a banner on the regional news site tagblatt.ch for CHF 1990, and a twenty-second spot on FM1 radio from CHF 390. None of this is an accusation — it is printed on their own rate card, and selling advertising is what a media house does. It is the reason the top of a result list is not the same thing as the most relevant result.

It also explains who you find there. A per-advert price is a filter that favours employers who recruit regularly and budget for it. A little over eleven hundred employers had an open role on ostjob.ch that day, with the ten largest accounting for 17.0 per cent of adverts — a genuinely broad spread. Ours is the narrower one here: just over four hundred employers for the same region, and 32.3 per cent of our eastern stock sits with the ten largest. That is the honest downside of an index assembled from career pages and portals rather than from paid orders.

What ostjob.ch does better than we do

The workload slider. You set a range from 10 to 100 per cent, and in Switzerland that is not a detail: 54.3 per cent of their adverts genuinely offer less than a full-time role. Our index records employment type as a category — part-time or full-time — not as a percentage, so a search for a 60 per cent role is more precise on their side.

Apprenticeships. More than five hundred open Lehrstellen sit on ostjob.ch under their own heading. We do not carry apprenticeships as a product, and for this comparison we removed them from both sides so the numbers stay honest. If you are looking for an apprenticeship in eastern Switzerland, they have it and we do not.

The presentation of the advert itself. Over two hundred adverts carry a video, roughly one in five a PDF of the original posting, and many a full company profile. Regional employers who disappear on a national board get a stage here. They also publish a directory of the region’s staffing agencies that has no equivalent elsewhere.

Which one to use

Use ostjob.ch if you are searching St. Gallen, Thurgau or Appenzell, if you want an apprenticeship, if you need a specific workload percentage, or if you want to see the regional employers who get buried on a national board. For those four cases it is the better site and the numbers above say so plainly.

Use SwissJobs.app if you are searching Graubünden, Schaffhausen or Glarus, if you read in English, French or Italian, if stale adverts waste your time, or if you are actually applying rather than browsing — because a CV written against the specific advert, the motivation letter for the same posting, and the RAV efforts sheet all follow from the listing you just found.

And the honest recommendation for eastern Switzerland is: both. Neither costs anything, neither requires an account, and they overlap less than their names suggest. Setting an alert on each takes five minutes in total and covers a market that neither one covers alone.