Why should we hire you?

Updated: 31 August 2026

In short

Give two or three points that the advert itself names and that someone could check, and say for each what you would do with it in the first months. The question asks about fit, not superiority: the federal employment service files it under «Your suitability for the job and your professional goals», where it reads «Why should the company hire you?». And the measure is not seniority — in German-language Swiss adverts, 0.7 per cent set a threshold in years of experience, while 47.2 per cent name a qualification.

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Which measure applies to you depends on the language the advert is written in, and that is the part most people arriving in Switzerland get wrong. An English-language posting in Zurich, Zug or Geneva sets a years threshold in 18.5 per cent of cases and names a qualification in 24.6 per cent. A German-language posting for the same kind of work inverts both figures. The same candidate needs two different answers in the same week.

Do not answer by comparing yourself to the other candidates. You have not seen their files and the person opposite you has. Of the four official Swiss versions of this question, three do not mention other applicants at all, and the fourth only offers the comparison rather than requiring it.

What a Swiss advert measures you against, by the language it is written in

Share of adverts whose short description names a qualification, and share stating a number of years of experience. Count of the adverts active on SwissJobs.app on 31 August 2026, using a separate word list built in each language. The Italian-language group is the smallest and comes from few advertisers, so its values are the least precise.

Two or three points, not ten. Each one: a requirement quoted from the advert, a fact with a size and a period, and the document or referee that backs it.
Read the advert's language before you decide what to lead with. Years threshold: 18.5 per cent of English-language adverts, 13.5 per cent of French, 11.6 per cent of Italian, 0.7 per cent of German ones.
The gap is not a sector effect. In IT and engineering it is 18.7 per cent (English) against 1.3 per cent (German); in finance and insurance 24.1 against 0.5; in health and care 16.0 against 0.4.
In German-language adverts the stated measure is the qualification: 47.2 per cent name one, rising to 70.6 per cent in health and care. If your qualification is foreign, the sentence that matters is the status of its recognition.
Availability is part of the answer. The canton of Zurich's own interview template checks at the end whether the candidate can «start on time»; the Vaud question list has a block of its own for it.
Say your permit status before you are asked. It closes a condition that otherwise stays open, and open conditions are what separate two similar files.

The official Swiss wording, and where it sits

arbeit.swiss, the site of the public employment service (SECO), publishes a preparation checklist for jobseekers. It sorts the employer's typical questions into four groups: your career so far; your abilities and personal qualities; your motivation for looking and applying; and «Your suitability for the job and your professional goals». The question we are dealing with sits in that fourth group and reads: «Why should the company hire you?»

Where a question sits tells you what it is for. This one is not filed under competition or self-promotion. It stands between suitability and what you want next, immediately followed by «Do you want to further your professional development?». So the thing being tested is the match between you and this one post — and what happens after it.

That changes the shape of a good answer. A suitability question is answered with requirements and facts; a competition question is answered with comparisons. If you reply «because I am more resilient than most», you have answered the second question while the first one was asked. A useful editing rule: delete every sentence in your draft that contains a comparative. What survives is the substance, and it is normally both shorter and stronger.

One practical note about sources. This checklist exists in German, French, Italian and English, and the English page is a genuine translation rather than a stub — a good sign, because several Swiss official pages stop at three languages. The employer-side documents quoted further down do not: the canton of Zurich template is German only, the Vaud leaflet French only, the Ticino leaflet Italian only. There is no English version of any of them, so the wording below is quoted in the original and glossed.

The yardstick is in the advert — and it changes with the advert's language

To answer «why you», you need to know what you are being measured against. It is written in the advert, and it looks different depending on which language the advert is written in. We hold a short description for each posting in our index. Among the English-language ones, 18.5 per cent state a number of years of experience. Among the German-language ones, 0.7 per cent do.

That is not a sector artefact, and it is worth showing the check. Within IT and engineering, the figures are 18.7 per cent for English-language adverts and 1.3 per cent for German-language ones. Within finance and insurance, 24.1 against 0.5. We do not publish the same comparison for health and care: the English-language group in that field is too small to carry a percentage. The same work, advertised in two languages in the same country, is described against two different measures. It is a convention of the language the advert is written in.

For anyone who has moved here, this is the single most useful thing on this page. The standard international answer — «I bring twelve years of experience in this field» — answers a criterion that a German-language Swiss advert almost never set. Seniority is not worthless; it is simply not the written yardstick, and an unwritten yardstick is a weak proof of fit.

The reverse holds too. If the posting is written in English, and in Zurich, Zug or Geneva many are, then the years figure genuinely is the stated measure, and an answer that avoids it misses what was asked. French-language postings sit in between and often set both: 13.5 per cent name a years threshold and 43.1 per cent a qualification. Read which one you are looking at before you decide what to lead with.

What a German-language advert names instead: the qualification

If not years, then what? In 47.2 per cent of German-language short descriptions there is a qualification: an apprenticeship, a federal certificate (Fachausweis), a diploma, a degree. It is by a wide margin the most frequently stated measure, and therefore the first thing your answer should point at.

In some fields it is close to mandatory. Among German-language health and care postings, 70.6 per cent name a qualification — the highest value we measure on a base solid enough to publish. For the French- and English-language postings in that same field we publish no share: too few adverts. If you trained abroad, that single figure tells you which line decides your application: not your years on the ward, but where the recognition procedure for your diploma stands.

A qualification on its own is not yet an answer to «why you», because everyone invited to the interview probably has it. It is the ticket, not the argument. The argument lives in the second half of the sentence: what you did with the qualification, at what size, with what responsibility, since when. «Registered nurse, four years on an acute ward including night shifts and supervising trainees» is an answer. «Registered nurse» is a line from your CV that they already have.

This is also why the question gets asked at all when the file is already on the table. The file shows the title. The interview tests what stands behind it.

Four official versions, and only one of them puts a rival in the sentence

The same SECO checklist appears in four languages, and the question is phrased differently in each. English: «Why should the company hire you?» — tied to the company. German: «Warum gerade Sie für diese Stelle engagieren?» — tied to the post. Italian: «Perché il datore di lavoro dovrebbe assumere proprio voi?» — tied to the employer again. French: «pourquoi faudrait-il vous engager vous plutôt qu'une autre personne ?» — the only one of the four with another person in the sentence.

The cantonal documents repeat the pattern. The Vaud careers office leaflet on job interviews, which takes its question list from the Fribourg employment service, prints «Pourquoi devrions-nous vous embaucher ?» inside a block headed «Poste» — the post — between «why did you apply?» and «why do you want to work for our company?». Even in French, it is classified as a question about the job.

In Ticino the question is absent. The state chancellery leaflet «ABC per affrontare un colloquio di lavoro» lists fifteen sample questions — introduce yourself, strengths and weaknesses, goals, conflicts, hierarchy — and none of them compares you with anyone. What it asks you to prepare instead is «il valore aggiunto che si rappresenterebbe in qualità di collaboratrice/collaboratore»: the added value you would represent as an employee.

So the safe answer across the whole country is the added-value version. It works in all four languages, including the French one, which offers the comparison without demanding it. If you are being interviewed in English by a Swiss employer, assume the German framing behind the English words — the interviewer's own template is far more likely to be one of the German or French documents above than an American interview guide.

What is on the sheet in front of the interviewer

It is worth reading one official Swiss interview template from the employer's side. The education directorate of the canton of Zurich publishes one for hiring teachers: a page of preparation, a page of structure, a page for the close. It is written for schools rather than for the whole economy, but the mechanics are the ones many Swiss interviews follow.

The preparation instruction is to compare the requirement profile with the application once more («Anforderungsprofil mit Bewerbung noch einmal vergleichen») and to mark anything unclear in the documents. So you are being compared against a profile, not against a person. Anyone who walks through the points of that profile in order is working with the interviewer's sheet instead of against it.

In the interview section the template asks why the person applied for this particular post, and then the question that matters here: «Was kann / will sie / er in die Schule einbringen?» — what can and wants the candidate to bring in. Bring in, not beat. The same document tells the interviewer not to create an interrogation atmosphere and to make sure that above all the candidate is the one speaking.

That last instruction sets the length of your answer. If the template expects you to do most of the talking, two sentences is too short; five minutes is too long, because it crowds out the rest of the profile. Two or three points with one piece of evidence each runs to about ninety seconds. That is the right order of magnitude.

Availability belongs in the answer

The closing checklist of that Zurich template asks three things that rarely appear in interview advice: is the candidate still seriously interested, would they be able to «start on time», and has an adequate list of referees been handed over. It also instructs the interviewer to say where the procedure stands, including whether there are other candidacies.

The Vaud question list gives the same subject a block of its own, «Disponibilité», with two questions: have you had other offers, and when could you start. Two cantons, two languages, the same position in the sequence. Availability is not small talk in a Swiss interview; it is a separate item being checked.

For your answer, that makes the starting date a legitimate — and often the strongest — third point. If you have a three-month notice period, name the date rather than talking around it; if you could come earlier, say so. Both are checkable, both concern the post rather than your personality, and in a shortlist of files that look alike, the start date is frequently the only thing that actually differs.

One note if you are applying to the federal administration, the country's largest public employer: its job portal states that the different organisational units «carry out their recruitment independently» and «do not have access to applications submitted to other units». Two applications inside the Confederation therefore mean two independent interviews and two separate answers to «why you», against two different requirement profiles.

The build: three claims, each with a receipt

The answer has a fixed shape and it is short. First the requirement, quoted from the advert, so it is clear what you are answering. Second a fact from your working life with a size and a period. Third the receipt: the Arbeitszeugnis (the Swiss employer reference), the diploma, the referee who can confirm it. Then one sentence on what you would take on in the first months.

A commercial example: «You write that the role runs accounts receivable and dunning. I have done that for four years for a company of around eighty staff, including quarterly closes; it is listed among my main duties in my interim reference. In the first weeks I would clear the open items so the quarterly close does not wait on them.» Three sentences, three checkable statements, no comparison with anybody.

The receipt is the part most people leave out, and it works particularly well in Switzerland because the dossier already contains it. Employer references are standard here, the interviewer has them, and a claim that matches a line in your reference costs you nothing. A claim that contradicts one is the most expensive sentence in the interview.

Choose your points from the advert rather than from pride. The order in an advert is usually a ranking: what comes first weighs more. And drop the points where your evidence is thin — three strong claims beat five of which two collapse under a follow-up question.

If you are answering from outside Switzerland

Roughly a third of the readers of these pages search from France, Germany or Italy, and many more from further away. Three things are different here from what an international interview guide will have told you.

First, the Swiss dossier is evidence-heavy. Employer references, diplomas and certificates travel with the application, so your claims are cross-checkable in a way a self-declared résumé never is. That cuts both ways: it makes a modest, specific claim strong, and an inflated one fragile.

Second, the register is flatter. The Swiss version of the question invites a list of matches, not an escalation. Superlatives read as noise rather than confidence, and the interviewer's own template — as we saw — uses the verb «bring in».

Third, keep the Swiss terms rather than substituting the American ones. It is a CV and not a résumé; the workload is a Pensum stated in per cent; language levels are CEFR grades (B2, C1) and not «fluent»; holidays are Ferien and the pay is Lohn. Using the local word for the local thing is a small signal that you have understood where you are applying, and it costs nothing to get right.

What breaks the answer

Comparing yourself to people you have not met. «I am more motivated, more resilient, more of a team player than the others» — they have read the other files and you have not. Every such sentence is a claim about material you cannot see, and it spends the seconds in which you could have said something checkable.

The list without evidence. Ten qualities in a row do not read as ten arguments; they read as none, because they are interchangeable and they invite exactly the follow-up nobody has prepared for. Three points with one fact each is the upper end of what actually lands in ninety seconds.

The answer that contradicts the file. It surfaces quickly in Switzerland, because references are part of the application and because the list of referees is collected at the end of the same conversation — see the Zurich template. What you say gets cross-checked against two independent sources within the week.

And finally the modest non-answer: «that is for you to decide». It sounds polite, hands the work back to the interviewer and leaves nothing behind. The question is not asking for your self-assessment. It is asking for three facts, and you have them, or you would not have been invited.

The market figures come from a count of the Swiss adverts active on SwissJobs.app on 31 August 2026. The basis is those adverts for which we hold a short description; that description condenses the original posting, so wordings that appear only in the full original text are under-represented and every share is a floor rather than a ceiling. A «years threshold» is counted when a number of years appears together with a word for experience in the same clause; a «qualification» when an apprenticeship, a completed training, a federal certificate, a diploma, a degree or a university is named. Each advert language was measured with its own word list built in that language; the two patterns are constructed identically, but a comparison across languages remains an approximation. Occupational fields are assigned from the job title and may overlap; per-field values are published only where that language group holds enough adverts — for health and care that is the German-language group alone. The Italian-language group is small and concentrated on few advertisers, so its values do not describe the Ticino labour market. We publish shares, never absolute stock figures. The official wordings were read on 31 August 2026 on arbeit.swiss (SECO) in all four language versions, and on zh.ch, stelle.admin.ch, vd.ch and ti.ch; those pages are what counts.

Practise «why should we hire you?» for your occupation

Sources

What our job index says about the Swiss market

Computed live from our own index, not quoted from a study. Shares only, as of today.

Language the advert is written in

Deutsch: 60%
English: 23%
Français: 13%
Italiano: 3%

Of adverts that state a language requirement, the share asking for

Deutsch: 70%
English: 43%
Français: 21%
Italiano: 3%

19% posted in the last 7 days · Largest markets: Zürich 18% · Bern 10% · Genève 5% · Basel 5%