How to write an ATS friendly CV in Switzerland: which words are worth copying

Three quarters of the exact job titles on our own search are one-offs. And that is not a quirk of spelling: take out the gender markers and the workload figures and the picture barely moves.

The exception is retail, where big chains post the same standardised title dozens of times, so only three adverts in ten are one-offs. Everywhere else the numbers run the other way. Project management is the extreme: 84% of those adverts have a title nobody else in the market uses.

The practical consequence is blunt. A CV built from a generic keyword list is aimed at an average advert that does not exist. A CV whose headline repeats this employer's own words hits the one advert you are actually applying to — and that is the only match that has ever mattered.

Swiss adverts are inconsistent about this in a way that is very consistent by profession. Nine out of ten live software adverts use the English word in the title. Accounting leans the same way. Project work does not: only a quarter go English there, the German Projektleiter still wins, and chef de projet holds the Suisse romande.

And in care work not a single advert we counted uses an English job word. Pflegefachfrau, infirmier, FaGe: the local term is the qualification, so there is no English version to reach for.

For the CV this decides one line, the headline under your name. Write it in the advert's language, then let the other version appear once in the experience or skills block. Not five times. A search box matches literal strings, so one occurrence is enough to be found — and the person who opens the file afterwards is reading your last three employers, not counting terms.

Swiss job titles are packed. Roughly a quarter carry a gender marker — (m/w/d), (w/m), h/f — and a fifth carry a workload figure right there in the title, 80-100% or 60%. Both are employer bookkeeping. Neither belongs in your headline, and copying them across reads as a paste job.

The abbreviation is the opposite case. Only about one advert in twelve puts a qualification into the title, and where it appears it is doing real work: EFZ, HF, FH, dipl., CFC. Those are not decorations, they are Swiss qualification levels, and an employer who writes HF means HF. If you hold it, write it in exactly that form, in the headline and again next to the education entry.

Same for seniority. Where the advert names a level — Senior, Lead, Leiter, Head — and your CV says nothing, a literal search for the word comes up empty, and you have made a human reader work out your level from dates.

Among live adverts that state a language requirement at all, seven in ten name exactly one, a fifth name two, and the rest want three or more. So the multilingual Swiss stereotype is real but narrower than it looks: most jobs want one language done properly, not four done passably.

Where German is the one named, 88% of those adverts want it at professional level. That is the line people misjudge. Conversational German and professional German are two different applications, and writing "good knowledge" on a CV lands you in neither.

So the language block is not a decorative bar chart with four half-filled circles. It is a level and, where you have one, a certificate: German C1, telc 2024. French B2. English fluent. A recruiter reading that knows in one second whether to keep going, and a literal search for the language word finds you at the same time.

Three adverts in ten go to a tracking system we can identify by name from the application link. That figure is measured. Roughly half of the rest sit on the employer's own careers software, which is usually a tracking system wearing a company domain — that half is inferred from the link, not confirmed vendor by vendor, and we would rather say so than round it up.

What follows for the document is dull and worth doing anyway. One column, no text boxes, no tables, no headings that live inside an image, real dates, a file with selectable text. The parsing failures we see are almost never exotic: two-column layouts that interleave into nonsense, a name that exists only in the header image, a scanned PDF with no text at all.

Then keep the two readers apart in your head. The system matches literal strings, which is why the advert's own wording matters. The person who opens it afterwards looks at previous employers, what you delivered there, the portfolio, the gaps. Nothing in that second reading improves by adding more terms — and quite a lot of it gets worse.

The headline under your name is the advert's job title, in the advert's language. The qualification abbreviation is copied character for character. The language line carries a level and a certificate where you have one. The workload goes on its own line if the advert names one — 80% is a normal Swiss career, and saying nothing forces someone to guess.

That is the whole mirroring job, and it takes about ten minutes per application. Everything below it is yours: what you were responsible for, what changed because you were there, numbers where you have them. That part cannot be optimised into existence, and it is what the second reader is actually buying.

If you want to see what survives the first thirty seconds of your current version, our CV Check reads it the way a Swiss screen does and shows you what lands. And if you are starting from a blank page, the CV builder lays out the Swiss structure so the title line, the qualification, the languages and the workload end up where a recruiter here looks for them.