How the application tracker with the RAV form works

What the tool is: a filler for the official file

The proof of personal job-search efforts is a sheet issued by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs. On arbeit.swiss it sits as a fillable PDF in a German, a French and an Italian version. Those three files are what the tool uses, unchanged, exactly as downloaded from there.

It is the form fields of those files that get written. What you download at the end is therefore the official file itself, not a drawing that resembles it. For the question everyone asks — will my adviser accept this — that is the whole point: they receive the document they already know, with the boxes filled in.

The sheet you see on screen is a faithful rendering of the same page. It exists for preview and for input; what ships is always the official file. Anyone who prefers to complete it by hand still can: rows the tool has not filled are left untouched and can be completed on screen or on paper.

There is no English version of the sheet. Even the English pages of arbeit.swiss list it as a German-language file — checked on 6 September 2026. That is why the language selector offers three options and why it is kept separate from the site language: you can read the site in English and still download a German sheet.

Where each row comes from

A row is born in the tracker, not in the form. Three routes lead there. The job search: save a posting, mark it applied, and the row exists. The manual entry window, for everything no portal ever records — a phone call, a visit in person, a speculative application, an application to an advert you found elsewhere. And the CV and motivation-letter editor: finish a document for a specific vacancy and mark it applied there, and the same row appears, carrying the title and employer from that document.

A subset of those rows then reaches the sheet, and the rule is narrow: marked as applied, and the application date falls inside the month and year you selected. A saved but never-sent posting does not show up. Neither does an application with no date. Inside the control period the rows are ordered by date, ascending, the way a hand-kept sheet runs.

The date can be changed, and that matters more than it sounds: record an application days later and you correct the date to the day you sent it, or it counts in the wrong month. In the list view the date is edited on the row itself; in the form view the first tab of the row window does it, along with title, employer, town and contact.

Two rows naming the same employer in one month are normal, not a mistake: 54.8 per cent of the employers in our open stock have more than one advert live at the same time, and those employers account for 92.4 per cent of all adverts. Each application stays its own row, with its own date and its own job title.

What lands in which column

The application date supplies day and month in the first column. Into the large employer-and-address box the tool writes the employer name, the town and whatever contact you recorded, comma-separated and in that order; anything missing is left out rather than printed as a gap. The job-title column takes the title as it stands on the row.

The title is where a little editing pays off most. Advert titles are long — the median in the open stock is around forty characters, and 18.3 per cent run past sixty, usually because of gender suffixes, workload figures and appended qualifiers. On the printed sheet that column is narrow. Shortening the title to the function in the row window is what produces a readable sheet.

The contact is deliberately one free field rather than a name and a phone number kept apart. The sheet itself provides only one box for it, and what an advert offers varies wildly: sometimes a person with a direct line, sometimes a general number, often nothing at all.

Below the table sit the lines for enclosures and date. Both are set through the footer window and both are text, not file management: the tool attaches no evidence and keeps none. Copies of application letters and rejections still belong in your own filing.

The crosses and their defaults

Every row on the sheet carries tick boxes: assignment by the RAV, full-time or part-time with a percentage, the form the application took — written or electronic, in person, by telephone — and the outcome, meaning still open, interview, hired, or rejected with a reason.

A row created automatically starts on three defaults, and they are chosen as the most restrained honest description of an application sent online: full-time, written or electronic, outcome still open. No assignment, no interview, no rejection — nothing you did not set yourself.

The full-time default is usually right but not always: among adverts that state an employment type at all, 6.4 per cent are part-time. Roughly one row in fifteen therefore needs a click. Clicking the row opens a window where every cross can be changed, including the workload figure and the reason for a rejection.

Those changes live in your browser rather than on the application record: they survive a page reload but are not present on another device. Anyone who works on the proof from two machines should know that — the applications travel with the account, the crosses do not.

Name, AHV number and signature

The head and foot of the sheet are completed where they belong: name and AHV number are typed into their boxes on the rendering, the control period is chosen through the month-and-year field, and the signature is added by clicking the signature line. There is deliberately no separate settings panel.

The AHV number is not free text. It has thirteen digits, begins with 756 and ends on a check digit. The input therefore formats as you type, into the official groups, and recomputes the check digit. If it does not match, a hint appears — but nothing is blocked, because the sheet is yours and a red hint beats a fight with an input field. Leaving it empty and writing it by hand stays possible too.

The signature comes from a photo or a scan. Dark ink on light paper can be told apart by the brightness of each pixel, and that is exactly what happens: light becomes transparent, dark becomes ink, with a soft ramp between so the edges of the strokes stay smooth. The image is scaled to a width that stays sharp in print without inflating the file.

The whole conversion happens on your device. For a signature that is not a technical nicety but the reason it is built this way: the image is sent nowhere. The same holds for the name and the AHV number — they appear in the generated file and nowhere else. If placing the signature fails for any reason, the download still happens; you sign by hand instead.

The download: language, fourteen rows, two files

Above the rendering there are only two controls: the language of the sheet, and the download. The language choice decides which of the three official versions gets filled. It is separate from the site language because the two questions are different: which language do you read in, and which language does your RAV expect the sheet in?

That separation matters more in practice than it sounds. Of the adverts in our stock whose language is detected, 29.2 per cent are written in English and a further 1.4 per cent in some other language. Close to a third of all applications are therefore evidenced on a sheet that is not in the language of the advert — the proof follows the canton, not the employer.

The official sheet has fourteen rows. If the control period holds more efforts, several files are produced, numbered in the file name, each carrying the same header. Nothing is cut and nothing is squeezed. The row count is a property of the printed sheet, not a ceiling on your efforts.

The file name carries the year and month of the control period. That is deliberate: hand the proof in for several months and you end up with a folder sorted by month without ever having renamed anything.

Where the account is required and where the paywall sits

Recording, viewing and filling all work without an account. Rows you create while signed out belong to your browser first; they are taken over the moment you sign in and then appear in the account. Switch browsers or clear your data before signing in and they are gone — that is the honest description, not a warning with a motive behind it.

The download is where the gate stands. Without an account, clicking download opens a sign-up window; after signing up, the anonymously recorded rows are taken over and the download you clicked continues, with no navigation and no reload.

The first download after signing up is free. Only the second meets the paywall: someone without active access who has downloaded once before sees the access window the next time, and once that is settled the download resumes where it stopped. We write this out precisely because a description that hides the gate falls apart the first time a reader meets it.

What the tool does not do

It submits nothing. There is no connection to any authority, no transmission, no acknowledgement of receipt. What appears is a file on your device; handing it in happens through the channel your RAV names — often the job-search-efforts eService on Job-Room, or delivery to the office. An effort counts only once it arrives there.

It judges nothing. The tool does not say whether an effort counts, whether the number is enough or whether a row is well evidenced. That assessment sits with your adviser and is handled differently from canton to canton. There is no minimum, no traffic light and no scoring of an application.

It does not remind you. There is no message before the month ends and no note about the deadline. The deadline is set in the unemployment insurance ordinance: the proof must be submitted for each control period by the fifth day of the following month at the latest, or the first working day after that. Let it pass and the efforts count only if you can show an excusable reason.

It manages no evidence. The enclosures line is text; copies of letters, confirmations and rejections you file yourself. It checks the AHV number arithmetically, not against any register. It ticks no assignment box for you — only you know whether the RAV assigned that vacancy. And it does not produce the sheet in English, because the official file does not exist in English.

Finally, it is not the only route. The job-search-efforts eService on Job-Room feeds the entries straight into the unemployment insurance systems. The filled sheet is the route beside it, for everyone who hands in on paper or as a file — and for everyone who would rather keep the whole month in one place.