Cover letter template Switzerland: one page, four paragraphs, built from the adverts

That is the number this template has to survive. If you are applying in English, which most internationals in Zurich, Zug and Geneva are, you are sitting in the part of the market that asks least.

It does not mean the letter is dead. It means it is optional often enough that a weak one costs you more than none at all. A page that restates the CV in full sentences proves you had nothing to add and sent it anyway.

So: write one when the advert asks, when the employer is public — a Kanton, a Gemeinde, a hospital, a school — or when you have something to explain that a CV structurally cannot hold. Otherwise put the hour into the CV, which every one of them reads.

Every guide tells you to quote the reference number and address the named recruiter. In Switzerland both are mostly unavailable. A reference number turns up in well under one advert in a hundred. A named contact, or even a phrase pointing at one, appears in around one advert in fifteen across the market — counted where the advert spells it out in its own text.

Among the adverts that do ask for a letter it improves: roughly one in eight names somebody, and about a quarter give an e-mail address or a phone number. Another quarter point at an online form, which is its own answer — there is no addressee, there is an upload slot and a box.

The practical version. Subject line: Application for [exact title from the advert], [Pensum]. Not a re-worded version, the advert wording, because that is the string the recruiter is sorting by. If a name appears anywhere in the text, use it. If not, Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren.

And if the advert gives you a phone number, that is not decoration. Two minutes on the phone before you write tells you more about what they want in the letter than any template, and the person you spoke to now has a reason to look for your name.

This surprises people who learned their German outside Switzerland. Half. Not a handful of startups in Zurich West — retail, hospitals, prisons, cantonal administrations, industrial firms, all writing du to a stranger they have never met.

Among German-language adverts that ask for a letter, du is stronger still, close to three quarters. The kind of employer who still wants a written letter is not automatically the formal kind.

Match whatever they used. Sie in reply to a du advert reads a bit starched but is never actually wrong; du in reply to a Sie advert is the mismatch that gets noticed. Where the advert dodges both — and a quarter of them do, writing about the position rather than to you — use Sie.

Paragraph one: why this job, at this employer. One sentence, something only true of them — the department, the product, the shift pattern, the fact that they run their own workshop. Not that you were excited to see the posting. Everybody was excited to see the posting.

Paragraph two: take two requirements from the advert, in the advert order, and answer each with something you actually did. Not the adjective, the evidence. Managed a team of nine on the late shift. Ran the migration for the Basel site. The system that sorts applications matches words against the advert, but the person who opens it afterwards is looking for the work behind the word, and that is a different reader with a different question.

Paragraph three: the things a CV structurally cannot hold. Permit status if you are not Swiss or EU-resident. Notice period. The Pensum you want if the advert offers a range. Whether you are moving to the region and when. This is the paragraph internationals leave out and it is the one a Swiss recruiter is actually hunting for.

Paragraph four: one line. You would be glad to come in and talk it through. Then stop. No salary number unless they asked — fewer than one advert in two hundred does, and Swiss adverts almost never print a figure themselves, so anything you name is a guess made in public.

The Arbeitszeugnis is the part internationals underestimate. It is a formal, faintly coded reference letter your employer owes you when you leave, Switzerland takes it seriously, and a recruiter who asks and does not get one will assume the worst rather than chase you for it.

The photo, by contrast, is nearly gone as a written requirement — around four in a hundred of the adverts asking for a letter mention one. It is still convention on the CV itself. Nobody is demanding it in the text any more.

Order the attachments the way the advert lists them, in one PDF, with a filename that has your name in it. It sounds trivial. A recruiter working through applications on a Friday afternoon is downloading files into one folder, and Bewerbung.pdf is the fourth file called Bewerbung.pdf they have opened.

There is a second phrase running quietly through Swiss adverts: vollständige Bewerbungsunterlagen, dossier de candidature complet, complete application documents. It never names a letter. It means one, and every Swiss applicant over thirty knows it means one.

Count that wording alongside the explicit requests and the share of adverts wanting more than a CV goes to roughly nine in a hundred in German, ten in French, three in English. The silent request is where people get caught: they read the advert, see no list of documents, send a CV, and are quietly filed under incomplete.

So the working rule. If the advert names a letter, write one. If it says complete documents, write one and attach the paper. If it says neither and gives you an upload form with three slots, fill the three slots and spend the saved hour on the CV instead.