Cover letter Switzerland: who still asks for one, and who quietly stopped

The split that surprised me isn't geographic. It's linguistic. What predicts whether an advert asks for a letter is the language the advert is written in, and it predicts it strongly.

French-language adverts ask about twice as often as German ones, and close to three times as often as English ones. Italian-language adverts almost never do — under 2%.

If you're applying in English, which most internationals in Zurich, Zug and Geneva are, you're sitting in the part of the market that asks least. That's not permission to skip the letter everywhere. It's a reason to stop treating it as the main event of your application, which is what most people do with it.

There's a second phrase running quietly through Swiss adverts. Vollständige Bewerbungsunterlagen in German. Dossier de candidature complet in French. Complete application documents. It never names a letter. It means one, and every Swiss applicant over thirty knows it means one.

Count that phrasing too and the share of adverts wanting more than a CV goes from roughly 4% to roughly 5% overall — and in French-language adverts to about one in ten. One French advert I read spelled the whole thing out in brackets: CV, lettre de motivation, diplôme, certificats de travail, pièce d'identité. Five documents. No ambiguity.

But it cuts the other way as well, and this is the bit I find genuinely interesting. Of the adverts that mention a cover letter at all, about one in twelve mentions it to tell you not to send one. "Wir freuen uns auf deine Onlinebewerbung – auch ohne Bewerbungsschreiben." Another one, a manufacturer, wrote that the biggest motivation they need is that you want to join, so they've dropped the letter entirely.

Employers are competing for applicants by removing work from the application. I'd bet on that trend continuing.

If you'd asked me to guess which jobs demand a letter, I'd have said the white-collar ones. Consulting. Banking. Anything with a glass meeting room.

Wrong, and not narrowly wrong. Engineering and IT roles ask least of every group I looked at. Finance is lower still, around 1%. The roles that ask most are hospitality and kitchen jobs, then the building trades, then sales.

It makes sense once you stop being surprised by it. A software company collects applications through a form with structured boxes and doesn't want your prose. A Gemeinde has a process that has worked since 1994 and sees no reason to change it. A restaurant owner reading applications after closing wants to know whether you actually want to work there or just need any job that pays — and there's no box on a form for that.

Public and para-public employers — Kanton, Stadt, Spital, Universität, Schule — ask around 7%, against roughly 3 to 4% for everyone else. If you're applying to a Swiss administration, write the letter. Don't argue with the institution.

Counted across the adverts where the canton is known, Vaud sits at the top: roughly 9% ask for a letter outright. Zug is up there too, which I can't fully explain. Zurich, Lucerne and St. Gallen sit at the bottom, between 2 and 3%.

Here's the trap in that ranking. Geneva, which everyone would file under Romandie along with Vaud, asks about as rarely as Zurich does. Why? Because most Geneva adverts I looked at are written in English — international organisations, banks, commodity and watch firms. The expectation travels with the employer's culture, and the advert's language is the visible sign of it. The cantonal border isn't doing the work.

Practical version: don't reason from the postcode. Read what language the advert itself is in. That tells you more about the dossier the recruiter is picturing than the canton ever will.

This is the real Swiss dossier and it's the part internationals consistently underestimate. The Arbeitszeugnis is a formal, faintly coded reference letter that your employer owes you when you leave. Switzerland takes it seriously in a way almost nowhere else does, and a recruiter who asks for them and doesn't get them will assume the worst rather than chase you.

The photo, on the other hand, is nearly dead as a written requirement — fewer than one advert in a hundred asks for one. It's still convention on a Swiss CV and I still put one on mine, but nobody's demanding it in the text any more.

So if you've got one spare hour before you apply, spend it scanning diplomas and Zeugnisse into a single tidy PDF rather than polishing a third paragraph about your passion for the brand. The first one gets read. The second one mostly doesn't.

My rule of thumb, and it is a rule of thumb rather than a law: half a page, four paragraphs, and only if it says something the CV doesn't already say. A letter that paraphrases your CV in full sentences is worse than no letter, because it proves you had nothing to add and sent it anyway.

For an EU or EFTA national already living in Switzerland, there's usually nothing to explain. Your permit is fine, your address is Swiss, your last job is legible. The letter is decoration.

For a non-EU applicant, or anyone applying from abroad, there's a great deal to explain, and none of it fits in a CV: which permit you hold or would need, why Switzerland specifically, whether you can start in a month or in four, whether you've already got the right to work. That's a letter worth writing, and honestly it's the only kind I'd call load-bearing.

One more thing, and it costs nothing. Write it in the language of the advert. A German-language advert answered in English tells the recruiter something about you before they've read a single word of your argument, and it isn't the thing you wanted to tell them.