My name is Pietro, I am from the south of Italy and I have been living in England for the past 10 years, working in tech as platform engineer.
A few years ago I used to get the occasional cold call from recruiters in Switzerland without even being on the market or applying to jobs.
At the time I turned those offers down since I had recently bought a house here and couldn’t leave everything behind to move to another country.
However, it has been nearly two months since I have started applying to jobs anywhere in Switzerland on LinkedIn, and so far I have had a total of zero calls.
I just can’t make sense as to why I haven’t even got a single call from a Swiss recruiter after applying to nearly 200 jobs.
Is there something wrong with the job market over there or am I doing something wrong rather?
Admittedly I don’t speak neither French nor German, and I do believe that to be a limiting factor. I do however plan to start learning German soon.
I was in a similar position to you (moved from UK to CH).
The market here has changed drastically in the last few years. Where 3 years ago I was aggressively recruiting from the UK, with non-German speaking roles being a big part of my team… now, I hire almost exclusively German/French speakers (with C1 English).
Also, it’s easier to hire people who have lived here a few years - there’s less risk of them hating life here (it does happen - especially people who expect a dynamic city with nightlife like London or Dubai); not to mention that local hires have a network - so can help with business development…
There’s also a lot more candidates on the market, so much easier to find people - and we can be much pickier. Gone are the days of “find someone close enough and train them”.
Also are you making it clear that you have Italian nationality and you’re not British. It’s more difficult to hire non-EU nationals here for Swiss employers as they have to prove they can’t find a Swiss/EU national who could do the job.
This! If I see a CV from a third country national, it’s very rare it will be progressed to an interview… the cost/time/pain to hire a non-EU citizen makes it almost not worth it.
Following @MedeaFleecestealer comment…could it be the expectations of a CV in Swiss style?
In a globalized world, the Swiss CV is truly Sui generis. Around the world, some information is not included to prevent discrimination or whatever. That information is basically a must here:
This is important. If I had your CV on my desk, based in the UK (third-country) without knowing you are eligible to work in CH… I wouldn’t spend more than 20seconds on the CV.
The costs/barriers to hire someone without a work permit or EU passport are impressive. I seem to recall a figure of around 70k in internal costs being thrown around by our HR.
What i observed looking for the past 6 months, all IT jobs are now 90% filtered by German language (in German part of Switzerland, may be French part is more laid back), the rest your experience and education doesn’t matter even, had 3 interviews like this, it feels as almost swiss and germans existing employees be like “finally our time came, now whole team will be only german speaking”, so it just signals the market has a plethora to choose from and they don’t have to compromise on english as it was in the past. A lot of IT already outsourced as well, so yeah as mentioned above, highly experienced people already living here compete for the rest of jobs. On the other hand, there is always FAANG, so lack of German now can be replaced with 10000 hours of leetcode and you are good
