Swiss CV template: the lines the adverts actually ask for

The blocks are not controversial. What separates a Swiss CV from a downloaded template is which of them gets the top of page one — and the adverts answer that, because the recruiter reading your CV has one open next to it.

Counted across the adverts whose text I can read, a language requirement shows up on 98% of them. Professional experience is named on 76%. A formal qualification of some kind on 33%. Teamwork and communication, the two soft skills every template gives its own box, on 11%. A driving licence on 2%.

Read that as an ordering rule, not a scoring rule. What is named on almost every advert should be visible without scrolling: your last two jobs, your languages with levels, where you are and what permit you hold. What is named on one advert in ten can wait for page two, and the skills bar rating your Photoshop out of five can go entirely.

This gap surprised me. Experience is the second most stated requirement in the market, and yet 8% of adverts name a specific number of years. The rest ask for experience in a role, in a sector, with a system — and that is a different question from how long you have been at it.

Which means “10+ years of experience in marketing” answers almost nobody. Write the roles instead, newest first, month and year on each, employer and location on the same line. Two or three bullets per role, and each bullet says what changed: a number, a system introduced, a team taken over.

Keep the last two positions detailed and compress everything older into single lines. The Swiss first read is short and it is spent at the top of the experience block. Put the months in, and where there is a gap, name it in three words — travel, further training, caring responsibilities. An unexplained eighteen months reads worse than any of those.

This is where imported templates do the most damage. They assume education means university, so they give the degree a headline and squeeze anything vocational into a footnote. In the Swiss market that inverts the actual demand — the apprenticeship route is the mainstream qualification here, and the adverts say so.

So write the Swiss qualification in its Swiss form. Kaufmann/Kauffrau EFZ, not "commercial diploma". Dipl. Techniker HF, not "higher technical certificate". A recruiter recognises the first instantly and has to guess at the second, and a guess in a thirty-second read is a loss. Same for a Berufsmatura, a Fachausweis, an eidgenössisches Diplom.

Two thirds of adverts name no qualification at all, which is the part people misread as an opening. It usually means the requirement is obvious from the trade rather than absent — nobody spells out that the nursing post needs the nursing qualification. Where you hold a foreign qualification, add one short line saying what it corresponds to, and if it has been formally recognised, say so there.

There is no national answer to this, only a per-application one. Two employers on the same street in Zurich will advertise in different languages, and the advert is the only evidence you need: write in the language it used. If it is bilingual, use the language of the first paragraph.

That has a cost worth being honest about: it means keeping the dossier in two languages rather than translating once and hoping. And the translation people get wrong is not the prose but the titles — job titles, qualifications and school names should keep their original form with a short gloss, because an employer who cannot match your title to their advert cannot shortlist you.

Inside the CV, the language block is a separate discipline: state a level for every language and use the CEFR scale, because that is what a Swiss reader expects to see. Which levels are actually asked for, and what “good German” means when an advert says it, I went through in a separate piece on what Swiss adverts mean by language level.

Pensum is the Swiss word for the workload you are hired at, written as a percentage, and it belongs in your profile line rather than at the end. Among adverts that state a contract type, 91% are full-time and 6% part-time, with temporary work, internships and fixed contracts around one percent each. If you want 80%, the market will not offer it unprompted.

The permit line is the stranger one. A permit or right-to-work requirement appears in well under one percent of the adverts I could read — employers assume it rather than write it down. That silence is not indifference. It is the single fastest way an application from abroad gets set aside, because the reader cannot tell whether hiring you means paperwork, and guessing is more expensive than moving to the next CV.

So write it plainly under your contact details. “Swiss C permit”, “EU citizen, no permit required”, “currently in Berlin, can start within four weeks”. If you are a Grenzgänger, say so with the G permit. One line, and it removes the exact ambiguity that stops a reader in the first thirty seconds.

The one-page rule is American and it does not travel. A Swiss recruiter is used to a dossier: CV, then Arbeitszeugnisse, then diplomas, often as one PDF. Fifteen years squeezed onto a single page in eight-point type reads as a formatting decision rather than a career. Two pages, generous spacing, everything before roughly 2010 compressed to a line each.

The photo is genuinely optional and genuinely conventional at the same time. Adverts effectively never mention one. But the reader has a mental picture of what a Swiss dossier looks like, and a passport-style photo in the top corner matches it. I think the convention is outdated. It is still the safe play, and I set out why in the piece on whether a Swiss CV still needs a photo.

Then the mechanics that cost applications for no reason. Send a PDF, never a Word file. Name it with your surname and the role, not “CV_final_v3”. Keep the same header on both pages, add a line saying references are available, and have the Arbeitszeugnisse ready as a separate PDF, because in Switzerland they will be asked for.