How the motivation letter generator works

The three screens, and what each one carries forward

Screen one asks for a document title, the link to the advert, the employer and the language the letter should be written in. The title and the link are housekeeping: the title names the letter in your list, the link travels with the application when you record it in the tracker. Only the language choice changes the text.

Screen two asks where the content comes from. Either one of the CVs you already hold here — its content is read and handed over as the basis for your name, career, skills and register — or an uploaded file, if your CV lives somewhere else. Choose one of your own CVs and the upload control disappears: that CV already is the source, and offering an upload beside it invites two answers to one question.

Screen three is the advert. A large box you paste the posting into. If the letter started from one of your CVs, the box arrives already filled with the advert that CV was written for — still editable, because a CV is regularly reused for a second posting.

Only the final button creates the letter and starts the writing. Nothing is generated, and no allowance is spent, before it.

What happens to the advert text

The advert is stored on the letter and inserted into the instruction on every call for that document — the first write and every correction afterwards. That is the whole mechanism: a chat window loses the advert once the conversation is long enough, and this does not.

If the posting came from our own index and you leave our summary untouched, the summary is swapped server-side for the employer's full advert text before the model sees it. More of the employer's own words means a letter that answers what was actually asked for. One exclusion is deliberate: postings collected through the browser extension are left out of that swap — the text is displayed, but it is not put through a model.

Edit our summary and your version stands. The decision is made on the server, not in the browser, because the browser cannot be trusted to report honestly what it still holds.

The letter part by part — and how it maps onto the official list

arbeit.swiss lists what a cover letter should contain: your postal address, the company's postal address, the date, a subject heading, an opening salutation, and a closing greeting with signature (read on 6 September 2026).

The generated letter enforces five of those six. Your own details sit in the document header as a name, a role and a contact line. Then come the date line in the form 'City, Month Year', the recipient block as a single left-aligned paragraph carrying the contact, the employer and the town, then the subject line in bold — explicitly without a 'Re:' prefix — then two to three body paragraphs, and finally the closing with your name.

The sixth element, the opening salutation, is not one of the enforced parts. Check it before the letter goes out: whether it reads 'Dear Ms Meier' or something generic depends on the text you get back, not on a rule inside the tool.

Two more rules are hard. The body between the subject line and the closing may run to at most 900 characters — a ceiling, not a target, and the reason the letter fits on one page. And the last paragraph before the closing must be a formal call to action; a list of casual sign-offs, 'happy to chat' among them, is explicitly forbidden.

Today's date is handed over on every run, so an old date can never survive from an earlier version of the letter.

The letter's language is not the site's language

The four language buttons on screen one are not a duplicate of the language switcher in the header. They decide the language the letter is written in. Before they existed, the output silently followed the interface language, so reading the site in German and applying in Geneva produced a German letter. The choice applies to the first generation; after that a finished letter is never re-translated in the background, because a text you have read through should not change language because of a later tweak.

Our own index says why the choice matters. Among the open adverts on 5 September 2026, excluding apprenticeships, 65.9 per cent name at least one required language. Of those, 64.3 per cent want German, 47.5 per cent English, 22.3 per cent French and 3.9 per cent Italian — more than a hundred in total, because 32.1 per cent name two languages or more.

The usable rule of thumb comes from a second count: an advert almost always requires the language it is written in. For German-language adverts that holds in 99.4 per cent of cases, for English-language ones 98.8, for French-language ones 97.2. Italian is the exception at 88.8 per cent — and 35.9 per cent of Italian-language adverts also ask for German. Write the letter in the language of the advert; in Ticino, read the requirement line twice.

The level asked for is rarely casual either: 78.0 per cent of the stated language requirements are at a professional level, 17.0 per cent conversational.

Where your name comes from, and why an invented one never appears

Name, role, city, email, phone, portfolio and LinkedIn address are read from your profile under Settings before the writing starts and handed over as real data, explicitly for the letterhead and the signature. Anything you have not filled in is left out rather than completed for you.

Where a value is missing, the letter carries an obvious placeholder instead: 'Name', 'name@email.com', 'Company Name', '[Position Title]'. That is an explicit instruction with a history behind it. A CV once came back headed with an invented, entirely ordinary-sounding Swiss name over a real person's career. A placeholder is caught on the read-through; a plausible fake name is not.

The same rule governs the content. Only facts that appear in your CV or in the advert are used. The tool does not invent projects, figures or employers to fill a paragraph.

Editing afterwards: small change, full rewrite, your own rules

The letter opens in the same editor as a CV, and every paragraph can be overwritten by hand. An instruction in the chat takes one of two paths: a small change is located in the current text and replaced exactly where it sits; a translation, a full regeneration or a large structural change rewrites the whole letter. The tool decides which path applies.

A 'Letter rules' box lets you replace the style rules with your own. They are kept in your browser and sent with every call. What you cannot switch off is the standing brief — one page, confident and specific, led by the advert. It is applied on top of whatever rules are in force, so a replaced style rule cannot quietly turn the letter into a different kind of document.

Typeface, accent colour and template are shared with your CVs. Generate both with the same settings and the dossier looks like one document — which is the form the official guidance asks for anyway, since it wants all the documents assembled into a single PDF file.

Free, account, subscription — where each gate sits

With no account: you can open one of the letter templates and edit it in the editor. The draft belongs to your browser. Sign in later and it is claimed into your account in place, without a redirect and without losing the edit you were in the middle of. What you cannot do without an account is have the model write — that call requires a session and refuses without one.

With a free account: five letters a day and ten per rolling month, plus five AI edits to a letter a day and ten a month. Those budgets are separate from the CV ones. Before they were split, five CVs consumed the whole day and the letters for those same five applications had nothing left. Counting is rolling from the moment of the request, not by calendar week, so nobody is cut off on a Sunday night.

Paid: the money question arrives at the download. PDF and Word export need an active subscription or a running trial; writing, editing and previewing are free. The price is CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, after seven trial days. The placement is deliberate — the ask lands when a finished letter is on screen and worth something, not while you are still finding out whether the output is any good.

Free and account-free regardless: the five worked example letters per language — a standard application, an apprenticeship, a speculative application, an internship, and applying in German as an English speaker. Each downloads as a Word file, because the same text is already readable on the page and a gate there would protect nothing while costing the conversion.

What it does not do

It does not read the advert from the link. The link is stored so that it is clickable later in the application tracker; the text is pasted, or it comes from our own job index.

It does not send anything. No email, no employer portal, no auto-apply. Whatever goes out, you send.

It does not score the letter. The match score against an advert exists for CVs; in the letter editor that button is not rendered at all. No letter is tested against an applicant system here.

It does not research the employer. Whatever the letter says about the company comes from the advert text you supplied, not from the web.

It does not find the contact person. If the advert names nobody, a placeholder stays where the name would go, and you replace it.

It does not add a handwritten signature or a signature image. Your name sits under the closing as text.

And it does not file anything with the RAV. It fills the application tracker the official proof-of-effort form is built from; submitting it is still yours.

After the download: recording the application

The editor carries a 'Mark as applied' button. It creates the posting in the application tracker with the job title, the employer and the advert link taken from the document. The '— Letter' suffix the wizard appends to the document title is stripped first, because that suffix names the document rather than the job.

This is why screen one asks for the employer and the link at all, although neither appears in the letter text: without them the tracker would hold a row with no company. Nothing is guessed at that point — a wrong employer looks more authoritative than a blank one.

The tracker is what the completed official proof-of-job-search-effort form is generated from. For anyone registered with an RAV that is the actual reason to press the button: the letter is written, the row is recorded, and the monthly proof does not have to be written a second time.