What do you know about our company?

What the question tests — and what it explicitly does not

It is the cheapest filter an interview has. Someone interested in one specific job looks it up beforehand; someone running thirty applications in parallel manages it for none of them. The question sorts those two groups in about twenty seconds without anybody having to ask something awkward, which is exactly why it comes early.

What it does not test is knowledge. Nobody is waiting for turnover figures, founding dates or the names of the executive board, and reciting them answers a question that was not asked. What is being tested is whether you have understood how this business earns its money and where the role fits into that. It is a comprehension question, not a memory one.

Two features of the Swiss process change how the answer should sound. First, the room: the person opposite is often the future line manager, and in a smaller company the owner. They will notice within one sentence whether something was read or understood, and they are also the only source for everything you could not find. Asking them is therefore not a gap in your preparation — it is the part of the meeting they are there for.

Second, the register. Swiss hiring rewards evidence over enthusiasm in the same way the Swiss dossier does: an Arbeitszeugnis (the employer reference every Swiss employee is entitled to) states what someone did, not how excited they were about it. Applying that standard to this answer means one checkable statement beats three admiring ones. Candidates arriving from the United States or the United Kingdom usually over-index on passion here and under-index on specifics, and it reads as thin rather than warm.

The company name usually tells you nothing — and that is measurable

We counted every employer name currently carrying open adverts in our index and asked one question of each: does the name itself contain a word that gives away the activity — hospital, bank, Treuhand, construction, garage, pharmacy, school, commune, logistics and so on — or a place or canton name?

The result: 15.5 per cent carry an activity word, 11.6 per cent carry a place or country name, and 76.7 per cent carry neither. Each employer is counted once regardless of how many jobs it has open, so a single large advertiser cannot move the figure.

The word lists are hand-built, so the share without a clue is an upper bound, and it was cross-checked. With a deliberately generous list that also counts soft words such as consulting, solutions, services, systems, care or energy as an activity hint, 68.6 per cent still carry nothing; with a very narrow list it rises to 84.5 per cent. Roughly seven employers in ten have a name that is a brand rather than an answer.

Split by the language the advert is written in, one figure matters more than the rest for anyone reading this in English. Among employers advertising in German, 20.2 per cent carry an activity word and 16.9 per cent a place name; in French 15.3 and 16.2 per cent; in Italian 20.0 and 17.6 per cent. Among employers advertising in English it collapses to 7.9 per cent and 5.6 per cent — 87.3 per cent give you nothing at all.

That is not a curiosity. The English-language part of the Swiss market is where international brands, group companies and Swiss subsidiaries advertise, and it is precisely where a candidate is most likely to research the wrong legal entity. Nine per cent of these names carry a group or country marker — Group, Holding, International, «Switzerland» — which is a warning printed on the label: what you find under that name may not be the operation you would join.

What the state publishes about every Swiss company — and the field it withholds

Every economically active entity in Switzerland has an enterprise identification number, and the Federal Statistical Office keeps a register of them that anyone can query online free of charge. It is the broadest official source there is, because it is not limited to entities in the commercial register. Art. 3 of the UID Act lists what it covers: registered legal entities, but also associations and foundations without a commercial-register entry, natural persons practising a liberal profession, administrative units of the Confederation, the cantons and the communes, and all bodies entrusted with public tasks. Those are exactly the employers a commercial-register search misses — the hospital, the foundation running a care home, the communal administration.

Art. 6 lists what is held as key data: the number and its status, the name, company name or designation and the address, the status of the entry in the commercial register, and the status of the entry in the VAT register with the start and end date of VAT liability. Art. 11 para. 1 then says the Office makes the key data publicly available on the internet and restricts consultation to requests concerning individual entities — single lookups yes, bulk extracts no.

And here is the sentence that explains the whole research problem. The economic activity is not key data. It sits under the additional data in Art. 6, the implementing ordinance names it explicitly — the economic activity according to the General Classification of Economic Activities, NOGA — and Art. 11 para. 4 provides that additional data may be made accessible only to the reporting authorities. The state classifies what every company does, and that is precisely the field it does not publish.

Practically, the register confirms that this legal entity exists, where it is domiciled, whether it is in the commercial register and whether it is liable for VAT — for a small employer the start of VAT liability is often the only hard date you will find anywhere. It will not tell you what they do. Two features of the public search are worth knowing: it can search former company names, and it has an active-only filter, because under Art. 12 entries marked as deleted remain published online for up to ten more years.

One boundary, so this does not raise the wrong expectation: the commercial register is a different source with different contents, and how to find the right entry there belongs to the neighbouring question, «why do you want to work here?», which has its own page. A register extract is never material for the conversation. It is the check that you are talking about the right entity.

Where the answer actually comes from: three sources, twenty minutes

The first source is the advert, specifically the parts almost nobody reads twice: the paragraph about the employer, the location line and the wording of the tasks. If you can compress the tasks into one sentence — «you supply hospitals and you want someone who holds the orders and the suppliers together» — half the answer is done, and it is done in your words rather than theirs.

The second is the company’s own site, but not the values page. The useful pages are products or services, client references and the list of locations, because they tell you who pays. Someone who can say after ten minutes who this business sells to knows more about it than someone who has memorised three mission-statement sentences.

The third is almost never used and is the best of them: the other jobs the same employer currently has open. They are a snapshot of what is being worked on right now. An employer hiring assembly, scheduling and quality assurance at the same time is building something; one that has re-advertised the same role for months has a problem there. Neither observation appears on any website, and both lead to a question that cannot be guessed.

Together that is twenty minutes. Keep the note: you will need it weeks later for a second round, and half of it still holds the next time the same employer advertises.

The build: three sentences and a question

Sentence one, what the business does, in your words, with the customer in it: «You build pipework for food producers, so for clients whose plant cannot stand still for longer than a night.» The test is simple — if your sentence says who pays, you have understood the business. If it only says how good they are, you have read the home page.

Sentence two, something current, with a date or an event attached: an opening, an acquisition, a new product, a vacancy in an area that did not exist before. Current means this year. A find from five years ago proves research, but the wrong kind.

Sentence three, where the role sits: «This advert is at the Aarau site and covers installation — the point where the deadlines have to hold.» At that moment the answer stops being a company description and becomes a statement about your future work, which is also the natural bridge to the next question.

Then the question that carries the rest. «What I could not find out is whether the workshop is at the site itself or whether scheduling only runs from here.» That sentence is what separates an answer from a recitation: it shows where your research stopped, and it is a real question rather than a polite one. It almost always produces information that exists on no website — and turns an examination into a conversation.

On length: two or three sentences and one question are enough. This question nearly always draws a follow-up, which is exactly what you keep your second and third fact for. Empty the whole file at once and you leave the other side nothing to ask.

When you find nothing — and when the person asking is not the employer

Some Swiss companies have almost no online presence: a page with a phone number, no text, no pictures. That is not a warning sign here, it is common — plenty of well-run small firms find their customers another way. The answer is the honest sentence: «There is little about you in public. From the advert I know you do X, and the register shows you have existed for a while — the rest I would rather hear from you.» That is an answer, not an excuse, and in a small company it often lands better than a polished one.

The second case is the one many candidates notice only in the room: the person interviewing you works for a placement or staffing agency, and the employer has not been named yet. «Our company» is then ambiguous, and the correct response is to ask which company this is about and whether the name can be given. Prepare something else for that meeting: why this task profile and this industry. That part is true regardless of the name.

The third case is more common in Switzerland than it should be. The name on the advert belongs to a group, while the role sits in a subsidiary or at one particular site. Say which one you are talking about. «I have read about the group, but I do not know how independently this site decides» is more precise than any figure about the parent company — and it is exactly the distinction the person opposite makes every day.

What ruins this answer

The self-description handed back. Repeating the home page in its own order tells the other side that you opened the home page, and nothing else. The distance between «you are a leading provider in packaging technology» and «you sell packaging lines to dairies» is the whole distance of this answer: the first sentence is theirs, the second is yours.

The fact you cannot hold. Every number, date and project name pulls a follow-up, and the follow-up arrives immediately. Mention an acquisition and you should be able to say who acquired whom. If you cannot, you have converted a neutral answer into a damaging one, which costs more than having said nothing.

Confusing the company with the job. A complete description of the business without one sentence about the advertised work answers the question formally and misses it in substance. The person opposite is looking for someone to do a task, not an audience for their firm.

And the substitution test that settles it: put a competitor’s name into your answer. If it still holds, you have said nothing about this employer. That is the same test the interviewer runs silently while you speak, only faster.

If you are applying from abroad, or have just arrived

The Swiss version of this question is more literal than the American one. In an English-language interview elsewhere, «what do you know about us» is often an invitation to show enthusiasm and cultural fit; here it is closer to a check that you have read something. Answering with energy and no specifics reads as unprepared rather than motivated, and saying «I could not find that out» is treated as information, not as a confession.

Show belonging through vocabulary rather than enthusiasm. It is a CV, not a résumé; the pay is a Lohn; holiday is Ferien; the workload is a Pensum stated as a percentage; the vacancy is an Inserat; and the place you would actually work is a Standort — a site — which is very often not the same as the company you researched.

The measured warning for this audience is the one above: among employers advertising in English, 87.3 per cent have a name that gives away neither activity nor place, the highest of the four language markets. If you are applying into that part of the market from outside the country, budget more time for this research, not less, and check which legal entity the advert actually belongs to before you prepare a single sentence about it.

One thing that explicitly does not belong in this answer: your permit status. It matters, it will be clarified during the process, and it belongs where availability and start date come up. This question is about the employer, not about you.