5 Things You Need To Know If You’re Hiring A Swiss Person
Switzerland. Small but perfectly formed home of meltingly smooth chocolate, painfully accurate clockwork, holey cheese and yodelling. There’s a lot of great stuff I can say about the place — even the flag is a big plus.
And now — Switzerland is also home to your new colleague. If you’re about to welcome a new Swiss team member, get off to a good start with Jobbatical’s handy guide.
1. Greetings: Don’t Leave Them Hanging
OK, read this before you start working with your new colleague, if you don’t want to kick off with a faux pas.
The standard greeting in Switzerland is the triple cheek kiss. Be prepared — and whatever you do, don’t leave your new colleague hanging on the final peck. Rejection is no way to start a beautiful new relationship.
2. Pick a Language, Any Language
Switzerland has a population of 7.7 million people, and manages to squeeze in four official languages.
They are French, German, Italian, and Romansh, seeing as you ask.
Notably English is not one of these languages, but the rather wonderful sounding Romansh — with its roughly 36 thousand speakers — is surely great pub quiz knowledge. If you ever win one on the strength of this answer, you owe me a pint.
Now — aside from the fact that four native languages for one country sounds rather greedy, this does mean that your new colleague is going to have a bit of a foot up if she needs to learn your native tongue. Polish off a few words of Romansh if you really want to impress.
3. Never Try to Out-Hike Your Swiss Friend
Switzerland is heaven for hikers, with thousands of kilometres of meticulously marked trails allowing summer hikers to explore and enjoy. And with the Swiss eye for details, you can expect the trails to be exquisitely well signed — look out for coded way markers that manage to cram in more detail than a short essay, including the destination of the route, the time it will take you to walk it, the types of transport you might find at the destination, the degree to which the route is mountainous, whether or not it is a passable track in the winter, and whether there is any prospect of shelter once you arrive at your destination.
You have to be a pretty solid outdoorsman to read the signs, and to optimise efficiency, tracks are designed to take the quickest route — not necessarily the easiest. So, if your idea of a hike is a toddle down a country path to the next pub, it is probably best not to suggest a ‘nice long’ hike with your new colleague, without checking out their understanding of ‘nice’ and ‘long’.
4. Double Check Your Details
Swiss bureaucracy is a thing. In fact, it is a thing, which I discovered — in researching for this article — is the basis for a fairly wide range of amusing, exasperated, and sometimes shouty blogs. All, notably, written by non-natives.
Because Swiss bureaucracy, if you are used to it, I suppose, isn’t a thing. It is just the way it is. And it gives a superhuman advantage to your new Swiss colleague, in the form of an eye for detail that makes Rainman look a little bit slapdash.
All of this translates to the fact that things ‘just work’. So in Switzerland, passengers expect their train to pull gently out of the station as the second hand on the Swiss made clock glides past 12; and bus and train connections really do connect, with efficiency rather than nerve shredding, nail biting sprints to the finish line.
This leaves it likely that your new team member will have a low tolerance threshold for sloppy error. The Swiss standard is well known to be held high. Probably best to re-read that report before you hand it over to your new colleague for review, then?
5. Meet the 72 Hour Party People
The Swiss are notoriously serious. About work. And also about partying. It is not that you have to be serious all the time, and you certainly don’t have to take yourself seriously all the time — but you do need to be ‘all in’. After all, even the Swiss Army Knife — which I presume was, at some historical point, anyway, used by the actual army — has a corkscrew on it.
If you’re going to have fun with your new Swiss colleague, then just don’t be half hearted about it.
For some insight into the Swiss-Party mindset, check out one of the many full-on celebrations like Oktoberfest, or the rather wonderfully named Grööblerfäscht. Perhaps the epitome of this Swiss spirit is Basel’s Fasnacht celebrations, in which 18000 participants in costumes and masks parade through the city in a festival which lasts for no less than 72 hours (starting on the dot at 04:00 hours on a Monday — getting up that early is all part of taking fun seriously).
Despite the crowds, the floats, the music, and the fact that the local bars and restaurants have to stay open for 72 straight hours to cater for demand, the traditional confetti, which is thrown so liberally that it finishes up ankle deep by the end of the day, is completely removed overnight, in a fabulous display of Swiss efficiency; before the whole thing starts again, in what can only be described as an equally fabulous display of Swiss stamina.
So you’re bringing your new Swiss colleague to a neighbourhood that doesn’t yet have its own 72 hour festival? Maybe you want to get organising. Or even better, leave setting up your new social showpiece to your new Swiss friend. Chances are they will do a better job.
