Social schemes for the unemployed of working age include social assistance among those facing the biggest changes in the last 20 years. During this period, the number and profile of beneficiaries has evolved to such an extent that it is now difficult to view social assistance solely under the lens of a final social protection net for a minority of socially marginalised individuals. Today, accompanied by a steady increase in the number of beneficiaries, the social assistance public has become much more heterogeneous, incorporating an increasing number of people for whom long-term unemployment or underemployment are indeed the main problem. Far from being a typical Swiss phenomenon, the radical transformation of the public in social assistance benefits has in fact affected all European countries. These developments fundamentally question the mission of social assistance. Traditionally, two tasks have been at the centre of social assistance: ensuring minimum living standards and fostering the social integration of the most socially marginalised. However, today, with the emergence of new audiences, the issue of redirecting social assistance systems to care for the return to the first labour market in the longer term is crucial. What kind of occupational reintegration measures and placement services do recipients of social assistance have at their disposal in Switzerland? What organisational arrangements do they ensure appropriate employment-oriented care for recipients of social assistance? In Switzerland, although reintegration into the labour market is now regarded as an integral task of social assistance at the political level, there are still few empirical studies on the effective practices in place in the various cantons in terms of assistance for the professional reintegration of beneficiaries of social assistance. Without claiming to be exhaustive, this study provides an overview of the current situation in Switzerland on the basis of the few existing studies and a questionnaire survey of cantonal managers in 2011. Despite significant differences between and within cantons and many gaps in statistical data, one of the main findings of this study is that access to employment-oriented care for recipients of social assistance in Switzerland remains problematic in several respects. While the offer developed by social services in terms of measures to re-enter the labour market is often limited, other practices such as interinstitutional cooperation or the use of RFOs for placement services also have several limitations. A comparison with the situation in Germany, which completely reorganised the care of its long-term unemployed in 2005 by creating a specific financial benefit and care structure for this category of unemployed, confirms the potential for improvement of the efforts made in Switzerland, in particular as regards the importance of returning to employment and access to the most promising labour market reintegration measures. However, and despite a significant reduction in the number of long-term unemployed since the introduction of the Hartz IV reform in 2005, German experience indicates that setting up a specialised structure is also not without creating problems, and that more generally it is difficult to attribute the success of a labour reintegration policy for social assistance recipients only to its organisational model.