What motivates you at work?

What the Swiss employer is actually testing

Whoever invited you wrote the advert, read a pile of dossiers and is budgeting months of onboarding. The expensive hiring mistake is rarely the person who was technically weaker; it is the person who works out after six months that the job does not contain the thing they came for. The motivation question is an attempt to catch that in advance — and to catch it against something that can be compared with the job description.

The federal portal for small and medium-sized enterprises states this purpose from the employer's side. It advises combining aptitude tests, interviews on skills and personality and assessment centres so that a company can "form a more accurate idea of the individual's skills and motivation as well as their psychological characteristics, and to assess to what extent this individual might or might not be suitable for a given position". The operative words are the last four: a given position. Motivation is being read as a direction, not a quantity.

The second source, the unemployment insurance's official application brochure, says the same thing from the candidate's side: qualifications, experience and references are one thing, motivation is another, and only someone genuinely motivated has a chance at the job they want. It then names the three questions behind it — why am I applying for this job, what interests me, what skills and experience do I bring — and says these should be perceptible in the interview as well as in the written application.

The consequence is a rule that carries more weight in Switzerland than in many markets: the question tests your knowledge of the job, not your energy. If you do not know what this role's ordinary day consists of, you cannot answer it. You can only offer adjectives.

The word this market uses — and it is not "passion"

We counted the open adverts in our own index for how they phrase motivation themselves. The count runs on the descriptive text we hold for each advert, one advert per employer so that no large advertiser can carry a rate, and the language is detected on that text rather than assumed.

In the English-language part, "interest in" leads with 40.2 per cent of the adverts that name a motivation, "passion" follows at 28.9, "enjoy" at 23.7 and "enthusiasm" at 22.7 per cent. That ordering matters most to readers arriving from outside Switzerland, because the imported convention is the opposite one: British and American interview advice puts passion at the centre, and candidates rehearse it accordingly. It is not wrong here. It is simply not what this market's own writing sounds like.

The German-language part is more lopsided still. "Freude an" — pleasure in doing something specific — leads at 47.9 per cent, "Interesse an" follows at 30.8, "Begeisterung" at 21.3 and "Leidenschaft", the German word for passion, trails at 16.7. Roughly three adverts say Freude for every one that says Leidenschaft. Note the grammar, because it is the whole point: Freude an cannot stand alone. It requires an object.

The French-language part mirrors it. There "passion" leads with 71.2 per cent of the adverts that name a motivation, while "plaisir" — the literal French equivalent of Freude — is effectively absent, appearing in 1.8 per cent of them across the whole French-language part, and those few cases come from two retail companies. So the register genuinely changes at the language border while the question stays identical.

What the motivation is allowed to point at

The second count is the useful one. When a Swiss advert writes "Freude an", "interest in" or "passion for", an object follows. We sorted those objects. People take 35.5 per cent of mentions — customers, patients, guests, residents, children, dealing with people. A trade, a technology or a craft takes 30.3 per cent. Two of every three motivations named by employers point at one of those two things.

The rest is thin: learning and new things 9.5 per cent, team and collaboration 8.7, advising and selling 7.4, precision and quality 6.1, autonomy and responsibility 5.2 — and variety 1.3 per cent. About three quarters of all mentions fell into one of those groups; the unclassified remainder is a scatter of one-offs rather than a hidden ninth category.

Now read that ranking against the two answers candidates most often rehearse: a good team, and varied work. They aim precisely at the categories this market almost never names. That does not make them untrue — colleagues and variety are real reasons to enjoy a job. But they describe the conditions you work under, not the work. The person opposite you is there to fill the work.

A stricter test confirms the order. Requiring the object to stand immediately beside the motivation word, rather than anywhere in the same sentence, lowers every value but leaves the ranking intact: people first, subject matter second, variety last.

How to build the answer, with two worked examples

Three parts, in this order, none longer than two sentences. First the object: what specifically you like doing. Second the evidence: one thing you did in the last few weeks that shows it is true. Third the connection: a line from this advert where the same object appears. The whole thing takes about thirty seconds and answers, as a by-product, the question of whether you read the advert.

A commercial role with customer contact: "The part I like most is keeping a case from beginning to end, including when it gets complicated. In my current job I took over the complaints, because they used to bounce between two departments; since then they come across my desk and I call people back myself. Your advert lists direct customer support second, and that is the part I am applying for."

A technical role: "Fault-finding is what pulls me in. During the last site rebuild I spent two weeks on an intermittent failure that only appeared at night and traced it to a power supply in the end. Your advert names maintaining the installations as the main task — that is exactly this kind of work."

Notice what neither example does. It claims no trait. It quotes no figure nobody can check. It pays the company no compliment. It gives an object, a checkable behaviour and a line from the advert — three things the interviewer can write on their form while listening.

The classic mistakes, in order of frequency

First, the trait instead of the object. "I am very motivated" restates the question rather than answering it, and the adjective chain — motivated, committed, resilient — has the additional problem that it already stood in your written application. Repeating it in the room adds no information, and the room exists for exactly that.

Second, motivation aimed at the employer rather than at the work. "Your company is innovative" is a compliment and is heard as one; it is also interchangeable, because the same sentence fits twenty other firms. Swiss interviews ask about the company separately anyway, so spending it here costs you both answers.

Third, pay as the motivation. It is a legitimate reason to change jobs and it is negotiated openly in Switzerland — but in the framework block of the conversation, not this one. The official interview flow puts salary, holiday and working hours in their own segment. Pulling them into the motivation answer moves the conversation to a point where you have nothing in hand yet.

Fourth, the oversized pitch. "This is not a job for me, it is a calling" sits above the local register and invites a follow-up nobody wins. And fifth, rarer but more expensive: motivation that is really a complaint about your current employer. The federal brochure is unqualified on this — never speak badly of previous employers, because your attitude towards the old company is read as a forecast of your attitude towards the new one.

If you are applying from abroad, three Swiss specifics

The register is the first. Swiss interviews reward the understated, evidenced version and treat the loud one as a claim needing proof. That is not politeness for its own sake — it is consistent with everything else in a Swiss dossier, where an Arbeitszeugnis (the employer reference every Swiss worker carries) states what someone did rather than how they felt about it. Bring the same tone into the motivation answer and it will read as normal rather than flat.

The second is the language of the advert. Which of the four language regions you are applying into decides which word you should echo, and the words are not translations of each other: Freude in the German-speaking part, passion in the Romandie. Answering in the language the advert is written in, using the advert's own noun, is worth more than a fluent answer in a language nobody asked for.

The third is the workload. Swiss adverts state a Pensum in per cent, and part-time is ordinary rather than a concession, including in qualified roles. If part of your honest motivation is a specific working pattern — a fixed day, a reduced Pensum, a shorter commute — that belongs in the framework part of the conversation, where such things are normal and negotiable, rather than dressed up as motivation.

One thing that is not a Swiss specific: nobody expects you to have wanted this job since childhood. The federal guidance frames motivation as a reason for applying to this post, which is a much lower and much more checkable bar.

If the question catches you cold

There is an emergency version and it beats the adjective. Take the task you have done longest and liked most in your current or last job, describe it in two sentences concretely enough that somebody could picture it, and stop. That already answers the motivation question, because it names an object — even if you never use the word motivation at all.

If you did not follow the question, repeat it back. The federal brochure recommends this explicitly as a technique — "you would like to know why …" — which buys you thinking time and reads as attentive rather than uncertain. A second of pause costs less than an answer that misses the question and then has to be corrected.

And if your honest answer is one people are reluctant to say out loud — security, a shorter journey, hours that fit caring responsibilities — do not present it as motivation. Present it as a working condition, in the part of the interview where working conditions are discussed. That is not concealment; it is the same separation the conversation is already making.