I initiated this process once as an employer. Although it was unsuccessful, I can tell you what I learned.

The outcome depends on more than the written rules.

As for the written rules. If you are from outside the EU, then it’s not your employer who will decide whether they want to employ you. They have to apply for your permit if they want to hire you. Immigration office will determine whether they should hire you or not. They must deliver your signed working contract as well as additional documents to convince someone, who has no idea of the job, that you are the best for the job.

This decision has a few sane elements mixed with the general insanity.

First of all, your employer has to try to find an employee for your job in the country as well as in the EU. They must prove they tried everything to hire someone else than you. They have to tell RAV about your job offer. (RAV is the unemployment office).

RAV will send your wannabe employer candidates for your wannabe job. They have to interview them. They must explain why the local candidates suck, but you will excel in the job.

They also have to advertise the job on portals and/or newspapers. For at least a few weeks, they must keep trying to find someone local or semi-local.

I believe these rules make sense most of the time. When one is looking for an employee from another country because their business needs that person, it’s usually the exception.

I wanted to employ a person from Russia for an online business I wanted to do in the Russian market. For this reason, someone who lived in Russia and knew my target market well would have made a better candidate than someone in Switzerland who speaks Russian and knows who Putin is.

The immigration office does not care about what the employer needs. They care about what they believe the employer should think they need.

They expect the employer to write a job application that they can understand. They don’t know how a business works. Otherwise, they would not work for the immigration office but run a business.

They also examine whether the Swiss market needs a specific business area or not. Like if they had an idea of that.

Summary: it does not matter how talented or experienced you are for the job. It matters what kind of degrees you have. A Ph.D. will help.

Also, most people keep their brain in a vegetative state. It must be the reason they believe the larger the company is the better they know the truth about Life and God. I mean, if your wannabe employer is an international insurance company, the chances they succeed in employing you are higher because people think like "oh, they are big, they must know what they are doing".

If you apply for a job in a startup or a smaller company, you need a masters degree, or the startup has to run their business in a specific market where few people work. Better if both are true.

The best you can do for yourself (I mean, in this subject) is that if you imagine the immigration office as the hardest part of your job interview. They will look at your CV. They will look at your education. It’s even more difficult because they unlikely will talk to you. At least, not in the beginning. Don’t even try without a professional CV even if your employer doesn’t care. Hint: in Switzerland, a professional CV has a photo of you, it’s 1-5 pages, and it ends with the list of your hobbies that should include sport and something fancy like visiting art museums. Don’t write in it how excellent you are. Describe what you have done in the past. Of course, it helps if it’s attractive.

By the way, everything (degrees, recommendation letters, whatever you have) has to be translated to one of the official languages of Switzerland by some certified translator. No, that’s not the Italian but the DerDieDas nightmare.

In one sentence: You can come, but you need to prove you want it hard, you do everything they ask you, you will follow the rules, and the country will benefit from letting you in. You need to be better than most of the locals or the EU citizens. No, that’s not true. You need papers that will make the office believe you are the best catch.

Ahhh, I call it the mysteries of Switzerland. When I hear people saying it is not possible to come here as a non-specialist, non-EU etc. I can't help laughing....

Try to advertise the job in a way so that not many people would qualify. If you can still find someone here, well, good for them, no?

Thank you Amanda for the detailed explanation. It was very helpful.

May I ask at which stage your application was rejected? By the canton or by the SEM? And what did they say as reason for rejection?

I was kicked out of high school. That’s my education. I wish it happened sooner. The school was the biggest waste of time in my life.

That’s what I did. No one else could fit that job description. They still can say that the degrees are not good enough, or there must be local people on this and this job market.

Anyway, when I want to solve something, I do it. In that case, I lost my interest in employing the person for another reason.

It was rejected still in Zürich. I had the option to argue. If I argued, and I didn’t succeed, I would have paid for it. But I didn’t want to employ the person anymore for another reason. If I wanted, I would have done it.

Anyway, they told me the reasons were:

* Education isn’t great enough
* There are enough locals on the job market in my business area

I think that arguing with the second statement would have been advertising the job and tell RAV about it as well. Probably it would also solve the first issue.