Methodology

Pulse counts new postings across the major Swiss job boards JobHiker tracks, plus a capped sample from LinkedIn. It is not a census of every vacancy in Switzerland — structure and trend, not a full count. We deliberately don’t name individual boards here or anywhere else in Pulse; what matters is the shape of the market, not which specific site a posting came from.

A posting belongs to the Europe/Zurich calendar date it was posted on, or the date it was first crawled when the board gives no posting date. A posting only counts on the day it was crawled within 1 dayof going up — one first seen well after it was posted (a backfill, a keyword search reaching back) does not land on its original day and inflate it after the fact. Excluded rows are counted separately, never silently dropped.

One posting is one row: the same vacancy cross-posted to more than one board is collapsed to a single count at the point it's collected, before Pulse ever reads it.

Every number is compared against the same weekday over the previous 4weeks — index 100 is that average. A comparison only publishes when all 4 baseline weeks have data, their average is at least 20 postings, no public holiday falls inside the window, and no crawl change (see below) falls inside it either. When a day doesn’t clear that bar, Pulse says so rather than publishing a number that would mislead.

A day's first count, published the next morning, is a lower bound: some postings are still arriving. Revised counts are taken later (typically one and three days after) and stored alongside the original — the original published number is never edited, but the archive's later view of a day can differ from what first went out.

Swiss national and cantonal public holidays are flagged and excluded from what counts as a signal, both on the day itself and inside its baseline window, so a quiet holiday Monday doesn't read as a market shift.

A crawl break is a day intake changed for a reason on our side — a new source, a scraper fix, a taxonomy change — not a market reason. Trend comparisons refuse to span one.

• 16 September 2026 — PR #52 merged: ISCO-08 taxonomy with real search terms and continuous keyword lanes changed crawl intake.
• 30 August 2026 — Keyword sweep started reaching JobCloud free listings: intake stepped from ~80 to ~7,000 new jobs a day for crawl reasons, not market reasons.

Pulse never publishes individual job rows, full job descriptions or full company lists — only counts, shares and an index derived from them.

If something here looks wrong, or you have a question about how a number was derived, email hello@jobhiker.com.