What are your chances of an employer in Switzerland hiring you if you are looking for a job after your 50th birthday has come and gone?
You are healthy, fit, and have a vast experience in your field that any employer would want to snap up.
But in reality, it doesn’t work this way in Switzerland.
While no company will tell you straight out that you are too old to be hired, chances are you will lose out to a younger candidate.
This is what happened to Marie, who has a solid experience, and stellar recommendations, as an executive assistant to CEOs of several multi-national companies.
When she was looking for a new position in the same field at age 47, “not one HR manager called me for an interview,” she said.
Another person, Georges, who was looking for a job as a software engineer after his former employer declared bankruptcy due to Covid, noticed that “most adverts specified that candidates must be between 30 and 40.”
Georges was 49 at the time.
What are the reasons for this attitude?
Among the unspoken reasons may be the fact that experienced employees with a long professional track record are more expensive to hire (in terms of wages) than younger ones, or a fear they may not be able to keep up with the responsibilities.
In general, “preference for younger people in the labour market relies heavily on preconceptions,” according to Kurt Pärli, Law professor at University of Basel.
However, “generalising assumptions about mental and physical capabilities diminishing in old age are not borne out by the findings of recent aging research.”
Instead, “the aging processes differ from one individual to another – and many older people harbour untapped potential to mobilise and develop their own professional skills.”
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Is this kind of ‘selective’ hiring even legal?
Generally speaking, employers are not allowed to discriminate against candidates based on their age (though this particular law is not the same for everyone — read more about this below).
In practice, however, no HR manager will tell an applicant that he or she is not being hired because they are too old.
But this kind of attitude is rife.
“Age discrimination is ‘standard’ here,” Pärli pointed out.
“Studies show that three out of four workers [in Switzerland] face an age- related disadvantage when changing jobs,” he said.
Public versus private
Public entities, like federal, cantonal or municipal administrations, or the post office, for instance, are bound by the law prohibiting age discrimination in employment.
So you won’t see these, or any other organisations funded by taxpayers, advertise age limits or — overtly or covertly — discriminating against candidates on the basis of age.
Private companies, on the other hand, have more leeway in this respect, namely, the so-called ‘freedom of contract.’
It allows these companies, within the limits of the law, to choose with whom they want to enter into a contractual relationship — or not.
“This is considered an extremely important principle in Switzerland,” Pärli said.
Although employment contracts under private law do impose a number of obligations on employers, “older people are still disproportionately affected by redundancies.”
In practice, such dismissals — or not hiring an older person in the first place — are only deemed improper if the employer specifically mentions age as the reason, Pärli noted.
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But this ‘ageist’ attitude may be changing
Perhaps not (yet) in terms of hiring practices, but open-mindedness prevails regarding the retirement age.
Since the number of retirees in Switzerland will grow sharply by 2035, while the working population will only increase by 7 percent in the same period, there will be a marked shortfall in the workforce.
To prevent this scenario from happening, and to keep money flowing into the pension fund, the government would like people in Switzerland to continue working beyond the statuary retirement age of 65.
In a way of incentives, the Federal Council wants to increase the contribution allowance.
Currently, anyone who continues to work past the statuary retirement age has to pay social insurance contributions on the income above 16,800 per year.
The government is hoping that raising this contribution-exempted amount (to as-yet undetermined sum), will make the post-retirement employment more appealing.
READ ALSO: Swiss government says it wants people to work on after retirement
