Why do you want to work here?

The official Swiss preparation page asks it as two questions — and does not exist in English

berufsberatung.ch is the careers portal run by the Swiss Services Centre for Vocational Training on behalf of the cantons. Its interview page lists the questions you should prepare for, and two of them sit next to each other: «Warum hast du dich gerade bei uns beworben?» — why did you apply to us in particular — and immediately after it «Was weisst du über unser Unternehmen und seine Tätigkeitsbereiche?», what do you know about our company and its fields of activity.

That pairing is the whole instruction. The first question invites a reason; the second checks whether the reason rests on anything. Answer the first with enthusiasm and fail the second, and you have demonstrated both things in the same minute. So build the answer to the first so that it already answers the second.

The same portal says what to find out. Under «find information about the company» it lists five items: which services or products the company offers; what its specialisms are; whether it is a small firm or one with branches across Switzerland or worldwide; how long it has existed; and how many people work there. The accompanying question grid, a downloadable leaflet, puts the question in the formal register — «Warum haben Sie sich bei uns beworben?» — and glosses it in the next column: do you know the company and the sector, and it is important that you inform yourself about the company beforehand.

Now the part that matters if you are reading this in English. That portal exists in German at berufsberatung.ch, in French at orientation.ch and in Italian at orientamento.ch. It has no English version — the page declares its language alternatives as German, French and Italian and nothing else. The official Swiss preparation material for this question is not written for you, which is exactly why so many arriving candidates prepare from American advice and answer a question nobody asked.

One honest caveat about the source: that page and its leaflet are written for people applying for an apprenticeship. The wording of the question is the official one and adults are asked it in the same words, but the worked examples around it are about school subjects and taster placements. Take the question and its gloss; leave the examples.

The free federal source no international guide mentions

Three of those five research items are in a Swiss federal register, free. Article 936 paragraph 1 of the Code of Obligations: «The commercial register is public.» Paragraph 2: «The entries, articles of association and foundation deeds shall be made accessible on the internet free of charge.» Paragraph 3 adds that it must be possible to search those entries by criteria.

Article 928b paragraph 2 names who runs that search: the federal supervisory authority for the commercial register keeps the central record of legal entities and «shall make the public data on legal entities available online free of charge for individual queries». In practice that is Zefix, the federal index of companies, with no account and no fee, at zefix.admin.ch.

What you find there is not marketing copy. The Commercial Register Ordinance lists in Article 45 paragraph 1 what must be entered for a company limited by shares, and letter g is simply «the purpose». Alongside it sit the seat and legal domicile, the legal form, the date of the articles of association, the share capital, the members of the board and the persons authorised to represent the company.

The purpose clause is longer than most people expect. Across the entries we could attach for this page, the median runs to roughly a hundred words; a quarter are under sixty and a quarter over a hundred and forty. That is enough material for two sentences in the room and for one question that proves you read it.

And a line that frames the whole thing. Article 936b paragraph 1 provides that once a fact is entered in the register, «no one may claim that they were unaware of it». That rule governs commercial dealings, not job interviews — but it describes the attitude on the other side of the table exactly. What is public and free to look up counts as known.

None of the register is in English — and that is a practical problem, not a footnote

The Zefix interface offers German, French, Italian and English. The entries do not. A company's purpose is registered in the language of the cantonal register office that holds it, and querying in English returns the same original text. We checked this on entries from three language regions: a Basel company's purpose comes back in German whichever language you ask in, a Geneva company's in French, a Bellinzona company's in Italian.

Across the entries we read, 74.5 per cent state their purpose in German, 22.8 per cent in French and 2.7 per cent in Italian. There is no fourth number, because there is no English text to count. The ordinance that requires the purpose clause is not published in English either: the Commercial Register Ordinance exists in German, French and Italian only. The Code of Obligations does have an English translation on Fedlex, and it opens by saying so plainly — English is not an official language of the Confederation, the translation is for information only and has no legal force.

This lands hardest on exactly the people most likely to need it. Of the employers in our sample that advertise in English — the ones an arriving candidate is most likely to apply to — 69.1 per cent have their purpose registered in German, 25.5 per cent in French and 5.5 per cent in Italian. Applying in English does not mean the paperwork behind the company is in English. It almost never is.

The practical consequence is small and worth doing anyway: read the original, translate it for yourself, and then say the thing in your own words rather than quoting it. A borrowed translation of a legal clause read aloud in an interview sounds like what it is. A sentence like «your registered purpose is written around a cantonal mandate rather than a product line — how much does that decide what your team takes on?» does not.

The name on the advert is rarely the name in the register

This is where the first attempt usually fails. We took a stratified sample of the employers advertising with us — every one with at least twenty-five open roles, plus a drawn selection of the rest — and searched each name in the register exactly as it appears in the advert.

26.7 per cent matched a registered name once the legal-form suffix is set aside. For 12.0 per cent the best hit carried a longer name. For 11.7 per cent there were hits but none attachable. And for 49.6 per cent there was no entry under that name at all. The reason is mundane: the advert carries the brand, the register carries the legal entity.

We then read all forty-seven of the longer-name cases by hand. In eighteen of them the top hit is a holding company, a foundation, a registered branch or simply a different firm with a similar name. Take the first hit and quote it in the room and you may find yourself describing an association, an investment vehicle or an unrelated garage that happens to share a word.

One example shows the whole mechanism. Implenia AG, seated in Opfikon, is registered with a pure holding purpose — the direct or indirect participation in companies of all kinds in Switzerland and abroad, particularly in construction. Read that as a description of the work and you have misread a holding clause. But the same entry carries two things that are genuinely useful: the company was once registered as ZB Didumos AG, and it absorbed Zschokke Holding SA and BATIGROUP Holding AG. That is the company's origin story, in two lines, from an official source.

So search on one distinctive word rather than the whole name, and before you trust a hit, check two things against the advert: the registered seat against the place of work, and the legal form against what the business actually does. If «Holding» or «Beteiligungen» appears in the name or the purpose, you are looking at the parent, not at your prospective employer.

The company was often called something else

Of the entries we could attach, 45.4 per cent carry at least one former company name and 28.9 per cent have absorbed at least one other registered company. Close to half the employers you apply to were once called something different, and none of it appears on the careers page.

Four examples from the sample, all read in the register on 31 August 2026: CKW AG in Lucerne was registered as Centralschweizerische Kraftwerke. Accelleron Industries AG in Baden was Turbo Systems Holding AG. Bell Schweiz AG carries three former names, one of them Gebr. Kuhn AG. And Hitachi Energy AG carries two former names, ABB Management Holding AG and Hitachi ABB Power Grids AG. The register lists former company names without dating them, so the order has to come from elsewhere — but the names themselves are already more than a careers page will give you.

This is worth more in the room than any culture statement, because a merger or a rename usually explains why the department you are applying to exists and why the role is open. «You have been one legal entity since the merger but still run two sites, and this role sits on that seam» is a sentence another candidate cannot produce, and it flatters nobody.

How current is all this? 69.7 per cent of the attached entries had a register publication within the last twelve months and 27.6 per cent within the last three. For roughly one employer in four, something has been entered since the spring — a change on the board, a new signing authority, a capital change. It is a cheap check and it is dated.

One more field from the same source: 19.1 per cent of the attached companies have at least one registered branch office. Banque Cantonale de Genève, for instance, has four — in Zurich, Lausanne, Basel and Lugano. Knowing that turns «which language does the team actually work in?» from small talk into a real question.

«Here» almost always means a site, not a group

The question implies a single thing that often does not exist. Across the live adverts in our index, 20.7 per cent come from the sixteen employers currently running a hundred or more open roles at once, and another 26.2 per cent from employers with twenty-five to ninety-nine. Together that is close to half the market, and in that half «our company» is an organisation whose departments barely know each other.

At the other end sits the opposite case: 45.8 per cent of all advertisers have exactly one role open with us, and together they account for only 7.7 per cent of the adverts. There the question means something different — the owner is often in the room, and «our company» really is the whole company. The answer can be more personal and has to be more precise, because at a firm with one vacancy any general statement is audible instantly.

In between, geography decides. 71.2 per cent of adverts come from an employer advertising in more than one place, 53.3 per cent from one advertising in more than one canton, and 36.6 per cent from one advertising in more than one language. Which site you join therefore also decides which language your working day happens in — a Swiss variable with no equivalent in most of the countries our readers arrive from.

That gives the most useful sentence order for this answer: the site first, then the department, then the reason. «I am not applying to the group, I am applying to the site at X, because that is where Y is done» cannot be mistaken for a formula, and it is the honest version — it describes what you were actually able to assess.

One further finding from the same comparison: of the companies where we could match register and adverts, 80.9 per cent also advertise in the canton of their registered seat, and 19.1 per cent never do. For roughly one employer in five, the registered seat is somewhere other than any open role. That is the case where «our company» and «your place of work» are two different places, and saying so out loud is worth more than any amount of enthusiasm.

The build: one looked-up fact, one from the advert, one consequence

The answer is short and has three parts, and the order is the whole trick. First a fact about the employer from a checkable source — the register, the annual report, a press release, their own site. Second a detail from this advert, so it is clear you are talking about this vacancy and not about the company in general. Third the consequence: what you would therefore take on in the first months.

A worked example from logistics: «You have been a single legal entity since the merger but still run two warehouses in two cantons, and this role sits at the smaller one. I spent four years on exactly that configuration, including the move to a shared warehouse management system. In the first months I would start by reconciling the two item masters, because everything else hangs off that.» Three sentences, one official source, no adjectives.

The difference from the neighbouring question «why you rather than someone else?» matters and is often missed. That one is about your suitability and the evidence for it; this one is about the employer and whether you know them. If both get the same paragraph, one of them has gone unanswered. A quick test before the interview: delete everything in your answer that is about you. If less than half survives, it is not an answer to this question.

On length: two or three sentences are enough, because the question almost always draws a follow-up. That is what the second and third looked-up facts are for. An answer that empties everything at once leaves the other side nothing to ask — and the follow-up is the part of the conversation where preparation actually pays.

What breaks the answer

The mission statement handed back. Reciting the values off the front page tells your interviewer that you read the front page. Everyone did. Worse, mission statements within one sector are close to interchangeable, so a recited one sounds like an application that also went to three other addresses.

The fact attached to the wrong entity. This is the expensive one, because it performs preparation and then disproves care. Quoting the holding company's figures when you are applying to the operating subsidiary, or praising a product made at another site, costs more than a generic answer would have. Check for every fact which legal entity and which site it belongs to.

Pay and the commute as the only reason. Both are legitimate reasons to take a job and both belong in the conversation — but not as the answer to this question. «It is close» explains why you did not apply elsewhere, not why here.

Enthusiasm with no object. «I have been following you for a long time» survives until the follow-up arrives: since when, and what has changed since? A claim you cannot support with a date or an event is a trap you set for yourself one sentence earlier.

And anything that would fit every firm in the sector. The one hard test of this answer is a substitution: put a competitor's name in the sentence. If it still reads true, you have not answered the question.

If you are new to Switzerland — or applying from abroad

Two things about this question are Swiss and neither is obvious. The first is the register above: a free, federal, searchable source of dated facts about almost any employer, which the countries most of our readers come from either do not have in this form or do not publish this way. It is the cheapest preparation available here and almost nobody arriving uses it.

The second is that the expected tone is flatter than the American one. The official gloss on this question asks whether you know the company and the sector. It does not ask you to be excited. An answer built from two checkable facts and one consequence reads as competent here; the same answer delivered as enthusiasm reads as sales. If you have prepared with material written for a US resume and a US interview, this is one of the places where that material quietly points the wrong way.

Vocabulary is part of the answer even when you are interviewing in English. In Switzerland it is a Lohn rather than a salary in the American sense, Ferien rather than vacation, a Pensum stated in per cent rather than a part-time percentage, a Standort or Niederlassung rather than a location, and a Bewilligung rather than a visa. Keeping the Swiss term and glossing it once — «your Standort in Fribourg» — reads as settled. Substituting the American equivalent throughout reads as someone who has not arrived yet.

One thing to leave out: your permit status. It matters, it will be dealt with in the process, and it belongs where availability and start date are discussed. It has no place in the answer to «why do you want to work here?» — that answer is about the employer, not about you.