How the CV builder works: Swiss format, import, export

Three ways in

The three entrances differ mainly in how much you already have. Open a template from one of our template or occupation pages and you are in the editor in one click: the draft is created, held against your browser, and kept for thirty days. No account is involved. Sign up later and those same drafts move into your account without retyping anything.

The second way is the four-step guide. It asks, in order, for a name for the document, whether one of your existing CVs should serve as the starting point, for your content — pasted text and/or an uploaded file, or one of 188 occupation examples if you have never written a CV — and finally for the advert. The same flow lets you choose the language the document is written in: German, English, French or Italian, defaulting to the language of the interface. This route asks for an account today; a signed-out visitor is sent to sign-up and returned to the same step afterwards.

The third way starts on a job page. Begin a CV from there and the advert text is already in the guide, together with the title and the employer. Adverts that reached us through our browser extension are the deliberate exception: their text is not passed to the model at all. You get the title and company prefilled and write the description yourself.

Import: what is read, and what is refused

PDF and Word files are read as plain text, with no AI involved. Photos and screenshots of a CV take a different path: a vision model reads them, because a large share of people only have their CV as a printout or a picture on a phone. The ceiling is about 10 MB, and lower for images. HEIC — the iPhone camera default — is not processed, and rather than an unhelpful error you get the two-tap setting that changes it, or the suggestion to send a screenshot instead.

If too little readable text comes out, the import stops instead of inventing anything. That is deliberate. A scan with no text layer yields nothing, and a CV built out of thin air is worse than none. Facts from the text you supply are reused and rephrased; employers and dates are not invented, and sample names carried in from a template are replaced with your real details rather than travelling into the output.

What makes the layout Swiss

The page is A4 — 210 by 297 millimetres — and prints as A4. The structure is two columns: the narrative on the left, meaning experience, education and achievements, and the scannable side column on the right with the photo, skills, tools and languages. The round photo slot is always first in the side column and only on page one; repeating it on page two makes any CV look like a brochure. Page one carries at most four blocks in the side column, and the rest continues on the next page.

The header line carries what a Swiss application is expected to state and an American resume leaves out: city, contact, portfolio and the work permit. The languages block names a language and a level rather than describing fluency in adjectives. Page breaks are computed by the browser, not guessed by the model: the text flows, gets cut at real A4 boundaries, and when a list runs past the bottom of a page the header of that role repeats with a continued marker, so page two never opens with three bullets and no employer.

Why the languages block is not decoration

In our index, 65.9 per cent of open adverts — apprenticeships and internships excluded — name at least one language requirement. German is asked for in 42.3 per cent of all adverts, English in 31.2, French in 14.9 and Italian in 2.4. Two or more languages are named together in 21.1 per cent, and 78.1 per cent of the stated requirements sit at a professional level rather than a conversational one. Treating that block as decoration means dropping the one detail explicitly requested in roughly two adverts out of three.

For people who arrived in Switzerland recently, this is also why the permit line is in the header rather than at the bottom of page two. It answers a question the reader would otherwise ask before anything else, and answering it early is what lets the rest of the page be read on its merits.

Tailoring to an advert, and its limit

The advert is the reference text for every edit, including ones where you do not mention it. What follows from it is a change of order, wording and weight: the role that matches gets more lines, the matching terms appear where they are read, everything else gets shorter. What does not follow from it is a new skill. If something the advert asks for is missing, the tool says so in the chat instead of writing it in.

The editor also carries a short check: it sends the current document and the advert through the same analysis as our CV check and returns a rating with the most important fixes. One click hands those fixes back to the rewriter as an instruction. The full report stays with the CV check; this is the short version, in the same window.

Editing: type, ask, or open the code

Three routes reach the same file. First, type straight into the document: text lines are editable in place, and a single button removes a line. Second, say in one sentence what should change. Small changes are located verbatim in the document by a fast model and only that passage is swapped, which is why the rest of the layout stays exactly as it was; larger requests — rewrite this in French, restructure the whole thing — escalate to a stronger model that sets the document again. Third, open the HTML and CSS in a window and edit them by hand.

Every rewrite is stored as a version, labelled with the beginning of your instruction, and can be restored. A profile photo goes in through a button and lands in the slot reserved for it. Documents can be renamed and duplicated, which is the ordinary way one application's CV becomes the next one's.

Design: 54 combinations, not a template gallery

Instead of a gallery of finished templates there are three controls: 2 layouts (classic and filled), 3 fonts (Inter, a serif, Helvetica) and 9 accent colours. That is 54 combinations, and the arithmetic is printed here so you can count it yourself. The advantage over a gallery is not the number: it is that layout, typeface and colour are chosen independently, so you never have to accept a design as a package to get the one part of it you wanted.

Export: PDF and Word, neither watermarked

The PDF comes out of the browser's own print path, straight from the page in front of you, which is why the file looks like the preview. The Word file is built in the browser from the same document: headings become Word headings, bullet lists become bullet lists, and the two columns become a borderless two-cell table, because Word has no column grid. The accent colour travels with it. Neither file is watermarked, and the file is named after your document.

Word exists because recipients write in it — recruiters comment, advisers change a line. The price is structure rather than pixel fidelity: anything the converter does not recognise degrades into readable paragraphs instead of disappearing. When an exact copy of the layout matters, send the PDF.

What is free, and where the account is asked for

Building and previewing cost nothing, on purpose: payment is asked for when the file leaves, not before. Without an account you can edit a template, reorder it, choose the design and look at all of it. The AI writing needs an account — a free one. That free account covers 5 documents a day and 10 per rolling week, plus 5 AI instructions a day and 10 a week, which is about two to five applications in a week, since a posting usually takes a CV and a letter.

Clicking download is where the trial offer appears: seven days of full access, then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, cancellable at any time. Someone who is not signed in sees sign-up first, because a subscription needs an account to attach to. We spell this out because a description that hides a gate is found out on the first click — and being downgraded for denying a gate the product has is a worse outcome than naming it.

What the CV builder does not do

It does not apply for you: there is no button that sends the dossier to an employer, and no automatic form filling on other companies' sites. It does not check whether what you wrote is true — wrong dates stay wrong, they are just set more neatly. It does not invent skills to match an advert, and it promises no score in any applicant tracking system: the short check is a report, not a verdict.

The language is fixed when the document is created or first imported. Switching the interface language afterwards does not quietly translate an existing document; a translation is a request you make. And the RAV job-search-efforts form does not belong here — it sits with the application tracker, which fills the official sheet from the applications you saved.