RAV job search efforts: what counts, and where the adverts actually come from

No law states the figure. It is set between you and your counsellor and is meant to reflect your occupation, your region and the working percentage you want. In practice most people end up at ten. The proof goes on the cantonal form you sign: date, company, position, how you applied, outcome.

The part that actually costs people money is the deadline. By the fifth of the following month, or the next working day, and late counts as not submitted. The second trap is the period before you register. You are expected to be applying from the moment you know the job is ending, which means during your notice period. Start on the day you register and you have nothing to show for the months before it.

Now the side of it nobody raises in the meeting. There were north of twenty thousand Swiss positions advertised on our own search this morning — plenty, on the face of it. Sorted by the date the employer posted them, it reads differently: a quarter is less than two weeks old, and close to a fifth has been sitting there for more than three months.

This number is effectively the answer to how often you need to look at all. For each large occupational field I counted what share of today's live openings was posted within the last thirty days. Retail and shop floor roles sit at about 72%, hospitality and hotels at 68%, administration and back-office at 65%.

The trades sit at the other end. Construction, installation and fitting come in at 48%, so more than half of what you find there today was already there a month ago. Care and health are barely better at 53%, which surprises people because the shortage of staff is a national talking point. A shortage does not mean fast rotation — it means the same hard-to-fill post stays advertised for months and shows up in every search you run.

For your form that cuts two ways. In a fast field the monthly quota is a non-issue and weekly checking is enough. In a slow field the stock is exhausted after two or three weeks, and from then on you are applying to things you deliberately skipped the first time. That is where applications get written that both sides know are going nowhere.

The same calculation by region produced a wider spread than I expected. Bern runs at 65%, Aargau and Solothurn at 63%, eastern Switzerland at 58%. Zurich, the biggest market in the country, sits mid-table at 54% — a lot of adverts, and a lot of them open for a long time.

French-speaking Switzerland is at 48% and Ticino at 32%. Handing someone in Lugano the same monthly quota as someone in Bern is not the same instruction. Two thirds of what is advertised there today was advertised last month too.

Then there is the language filter, which no form captures. Among adverts that name a language at all, Bern asks for German in 91% of cases, French-speaking Switzerland asks for French in 62%, Ticino asks for Italian in 82%. Applying across a language border to make up the numbers produces applications nobody takes seriously — and roles that are not reasonably suitable in the sense the rule intends. A documented rejection is worth more than one extra line on the sheet.

Proof sounds trivial and goes wrong constantly. About 57% of Swiss adverts send you to an address belonging to the employer to apply, another 27% into a recruiting system that carries its own name, and only around one in six keeps you on a job portal. So you usually do not apply where you found the job.

In practice: put the employer on the form, not the portal. And the evidence is the confirmation email that arrives after you submit, from the employer or the system — not a screenshot of the search results. Make one folder in your inbox and move every acknowledgement and rejection into it the moment it lands. On the fifth of the month that is the difference between ten minutes of typing and half an hour of hunting.

Two things counsellors strike out: the same company several times in one month without a new vacancy, and applications to roles that obviously do not match your profile. Both look like quota filling because they are. If a month genuinely has nothing in it, the better move is to say so — with the refresh rate from the chart above, not with an excuse.

Interim earnings are usually the most sensible stopgap available. You work, the fund tops up the difference against your insured earnings, and the gap in your CV closes. It has to be registered in advance, and you keep searching either way — interim work does not suspend the monthly quota.

The supply is narrow, though. Across adverts that state a working model, roughly 91% are full-time, 6% part-time, and the rest splits between fixed-term assignments and internships. Regionally the spread is wide: around 9% of adverts in the Aargau/Solothurn belt and in Bern are part-time, against 3% in French-speaking Switzerland. Looking for less than a full-time percentage there means working a market a third the size of the one in the Mittelland.

If a reduced percentage is what you need, the detour through staffing agencies and through employers who have advertised nothing at all is worth the time. Both count as job search efforts when you can evidence them, and both lead to a conversation more often than a twentieth application to the same advert that has been up for three months.

A counsellor can do very little with the sentence that there are no suitable jobs. They see the same results page you do, and it shows thousands of hits. A refresh rate is something they can work with: in my field, less than half of what is live today appeared in the last month, and I have documented my way through the rest. That is checkable, and it is not a complaint.

The second lever is composition. If ten written applications a month is unrealistic, six applications plus two staffing agencies plus two evidenced direct approaches is often the better agreement, and in most cantons it is allowed as long as it was discussed in advance. Reinterpreting it afterwards does not work.

One practical thing on top. Set two saved searches instead of one, because the same occupation is advertised in Switzerland under two vocabularies more often than people expect, and in a slow field look once a week properly rather than every day in passing. The genuinely new adverts in your field may be a fraction of what the list implies.