Xing or LinkedIn — which is worth more in Switzerland?

The Swiss job portals at a glance

Click an image for the full-size view. What each portal actually is stands beside it.

1. 

   1. SwissJobs.appOur app

   Over 21,000 open Swiss roles from ATS systems, company sites and LinkedIn in one place — and from any advert, straight into a CV, a motivation letter, a CV check and interview prep. The RAV job-search-efforts form fills itself from your application tracker. Free to use; the account is asked for at save.

   SwissJobs.app →

2. 

   2. Xing

   "Find the job that fits you. Or let it find you.", the German-language professional network for DE, AT and CH, with a job search, company pages and an AI you describe your ideal role to. Much thinner in Switzerland than LinkedIn.

   Xing →

3. 

   3. LinkedIn Jobs

   The best reputation for English-speaking and international roles in Switzerland. Considerably thinner for trades, care and commercial roles.

   LinkedIn Jobs →

Feature comparison

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

Pricing side by side

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

Eleven Swiss cities, two platforms, one day

Both platforms print a result count above the list. Xing gives an exact figure («Jobs gefunden»), LinkedIn a rounded one with a plus sign. The two figures are not directly comparable — each counts, rounds and defines a city radius its own way. What is comparable is the ratio inside a single platform: how does Zurich stand to Lausanne, on Xing and on LinkedIn?

On Xing that day: Zurich just over five thousand, Basel close to two thousand seven hundred, Bern a little over nineteen hundred, Lucerne close to fourteen hundred, Winterthur and St. Gallen a little over a thousand each. Then it collapses: Geneva 125, Neuchâtel 53, Lausanne 42, Sion 15, Lugano 11. Zurich to Lausanne is a factor of roughly 127.

On LinkedIn the same day: Zurich over twenty-nine thousand, Basel over twenty-five thousand, Bern over twenty-two thousand, Lausanne over eleven thousand, Geneva over five thousand, Lugano 963. Zurich to Lausanne is a factor of roughly two and a half. That difference is the whole finding. Xing being smaller is unsurprising; Xing all but disappearing west and south of the language border while LinkedIn keeps working there is the part that decides the answer.

Inside German-speaking Switzerland the picture is friendlier to Xing. Winterthur, St. Gallen and Lucerne each returned a little over a thousand results, which is enough for a second search pass, and employers such as Spitex Kanton Zug turned up in the lists. If you are job-hunting in Zurich, Basel, Bern or central Switzerland, a Xing profile you already have is not wasted effort.

Xing does not treat «Switzerland» as a place

The most striking result came from the most obvious thing to try. Enter «Schweiz» as the location on Xing and you get a list of well over half a million results whose first page holds jobs in Hamburg, Berlin, Magdeburg, Bremen, Braunschweig, Vienna and Villach, with salaries in euros — while the sidebar states «Suchgebiet: Nur in Schweiz» (search area: only in Switzerland). City-level search works properly: «Genève» returns Geneva jobs priced in francs, «Bellinzona» returns a handful. The country-level search does not. Someone opening Xing for the first time to look for Swiss work is therefore likely to start with the one query that fails.

The second constraint is language. Xing exists in German and English and nothing else. Both xing.com/fr and xing.com/it redirect to the English home page, and requesting the Lausanne result list with a French language preference still returns a German interface, with «Vollzeit», «Karriere-Stufe» and «Gehalt» as the filter labels. LinkedIn runs separate language editions of the same city pages: the French one heads the Lausanne list with «offres d'emploi» and a count above eleven thousand, the Italian one with «930 offerte di lavoro» for Lugano.

This is the business model rather than an oversight. On its own recruiting site Xing describes its talent pool as «21 Millionen Talente im deutschsprachigen Raum» — 21 million people in the German-speaking area — and prints «21 Mio. XING Mitglieder in D-A-CH» as a headline figure. The CH in D-A-CH means German-speaking Switzerland; Romandie and Ticino are not part of the promise. LinkedIn, for its part, calls itself «the world's largest professional network with more than 1 billion members in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide» and has been owned by Microsoft since December 2016.

For a country with four national languages that distinction matters more than any feature list. The Federal Statistical Office reports that 41% of the employed population in Switzerland use more than one language at work at least once a week. A platform available in one national language is not a platform for this labour market; it is a platform for one part of it.

Where the Swiss listings on Xing come from

We read the application links embedded in three Xing result lists. In the Zurich list, 13 of 15 of those links carried a marker showing the click had come from xing.com and led away to another site. In a nursing search for Zurich it was 14 of 15; in the Geneva list, 19 of 19.

The destinations tell the story. Zurich links went to jobimpuls.ch, rocken.jobs, stbpersonal.ch, workmanagement.ch and zentraljob.ch; the nursing ones to stadt-zuerich.ch, zentraljob.ch, clickjob.ch and sozjobs.ch; in Geneva, eight of nineteen went to ch.talent.com, an aggregator, alongside Coop, Globus, Richemont and Vontobel. Several results are openly labelled «Externes Job-Angebot. Von einem Partner.» — an external offer from a partner. Much of the Swiss inventory on Xing was not posted there; it was collected. That is why Geneva has 125 results at all, and why they look so different from the Zurich ones.

One detail is worth knowing before you read a Xing salary. The franc figures shown on Swiss listings do not come from the employer. Xing labels them «Gehalts-Prognose» and the legend reads «Geschätztes Durchschnitts-Gehalt für vergleichbare Positionen» — an estimated average for comparable positions. A Zurich nursing advert showed «95.000 CHF – 108.000 CHF» although the advert itself names no salary. Useful as orientation, not as a negotiating base.

And like LinkedIn, Xing has no field for the Swiss Pensum, the workload stated in per cent. A City of Zurich advert titled «80–100 %» was listed under «Art der Beschäftigung» as «Vollzeit», full time. The percentage survives only in the title the employer wrote.

What Xing is still good for

Three things, and they are real. First, Germany and Austria. If you might move back, if you want to be visible inside a German parent company, or if you are weighing employers on both sides of the border, Xing still reaches parts of the German Mittelstand that LinkedIn does not. The country-level search that fails for Switzerland works perfectly for Germany.

Second, language. Xing is a German product built for German speakers rather than an American one translated into German. If you are more comfortable writing about your career in German than in English, that is a genuine advantage — LinkedIn's German help pages lag behind the English ones and the vocabulary is often translated rather than native.

Third, what is visible without logging in. The posting date, the full advert text and the salary estimate are readable on Xing without an account. The platform also publishes its own reach figures: «30 % Antwortrate auf Recruiter·innen-Anfragen» (a 30% reply rate to recruiter approaches) and «20 Mio. Stellenmarkt-Besuche pro Monat» (20 million job-market visits a month). Those are Xing's own numbers and they cover D-A-CH as a whole, so they say nothing specific about Switzerland.

What Xing should no longer be credited with is the networking part. Its own home page now reads «XING - Finde den Job, der zu Dir passt. Oder lass Dich finden!» — find the job that suits you, or get found — and what it promotes is job search, job preferences and a CV as a PDF. Xing today is a job platform first and a network second.

What actually decides a Swiss application

For this labour market both networks are a route rather than a destination. In our own index of Swiss vacancies, not a single advert sends its application to Xing, and the share sending it to LinkedIn rounds to zero per cent. Just over 38 per cent of application links point at a .ch address and the rest at employer career pages and applicant systems. In Switzerland the application almost always ends up on a company's own site — the platform is how you got there.

Geography is the second factor. Of the adverts in our index that can be placed in a canton, 18.9 per cent sit in Geneva, Vaud, Ticino, Neuchâtel or Jura; add the bilingual cantons of Valais and Fribourg and it is 24.7 per cent. 15.5 per cent of all adverts with a detectable language are written in French or Italian. That is the size of the market a German-only network leaves out, and the reason this question has a different answer in Lausanne than in Winterthur.

The third factor is the dossier. Neither a Xing nor a LinkedIn profile represents what a Swiss employer actually receives: Arbeitszeugnisse (the written employer references, one per job), a Zwischenzeugnis if you are still employed, the workload as a Pensum in per cent, your permit — B, C or G — if you are not Swiss, and language levels stated as B2 or C1 rather than «fluent». It is a CV and a dossier, not a resume. A profile is a business card; the dossier is what gets read.

Short version, by reader

Living in German-speaking Switzerland, professional or management role: LinkedIn first, Xing as a maintained second profile if you already have one. Creating one from scratch pays off only if German or Austrian employers are on your list.

Living in the Romandie or Ticino: LinkedIn, plus Swiss job portals in your working language. On the evidence of this query a Xing profile adds nothing there — 42 results for Lausanne and 11 for Lugano is not a job search.

Moving to Switzerland from Germany, or commuting across the border: keep both and swap their roles. Xing for the German side, LinkedIn for the Swiss side. And expect your Swiss profile to need things a German one never asked for — the Pensum in per cent instead of full-time or part-time, Ferien rather than Urlaub, and a Lohn usually counted in thirteen monthly payments.

Nursing, trades, retail, hospitality: both networks are second choice here. On Xing the Zurich nursing results were dominated by staffing agencies and the application links led onward to Swiss portals and hospital sites anyway. Go there directly.

For the search itself you eventually want one place where Swiss adverts from all four language regions can be filtered by canton and Pensum — ours works without an account.