Which requirements in a Swiss job advert are binding, and which are not?

1. Sort the requirements by register before you count them

Take the requirement block — "Your profile", "What you bring", "Ihr Profil" — and go through it once with a single question per line: is the word hard or soft? Hard: required, mandatory, essential, must have, a prerequisite. Soft: an asset, a plus, ideally, preferably, desirable, welcome, nice to have. If you are applying across the language border, the same two sets exist there and are worth memorising: exigé, requis, indispensable against un atout, un plus, souhaité, idéalement — and richiesto, indispensabile, necessario against un vantaggio, preferibilmente, gradito.

This split is a settled convention rather than an interpretation, and it survives being counted. Across the open adverts in our index each requirement type is softened at a similar rate in every language region: professional experience in 29.2 per cent of German-language mentions, 29.5 of English-language ones and 27.3 per cent of French-language ones. Languages in 30.0, 31.0 and 34.1 per cent. That is the same practice across three markets, not the house style of individual HR departments.

In practice: on the first pass, cross out everything carrying a soft word. What is left is the job. Reading the list top to bottom and taking its length as the measure confuses a wish list with a requirement profile — and that confusion is the most common reason people do not apply at all.

2. Take the qualification line first — it is the hardest line in the advert

Of every requirement type counted, the qualification is softened least often. 50.4 per cent of employers name a degree, diploma, university course or completed apprenticeship at all; in only 16.4 per cent of those cases does the naming sit in a sentence with a softening word. In German-language adverts it is 15.2 per cent, in French-language ones 12.3, in Italian-language ones 9.1. Where a qualification is stated, it is usually meant.

It does, however, carry a back door more often than its reputation suggests, and the door stands right next to it: 13.9 per cent of qualification requirements name an equivalence explicitly — "or equivalent", "or a comparable qualification", "or similar". In French-language adverts that formula is nearly twice as common as in German-language ones, 20.6 against 11.3 per cent. Such a line is an invitation. It does not ask for the same piece of paper but for a traceable route to the same competence — which then has to appear in the dossier, with the year, the institution and the country.

One boundary runs straight through this line and is not negotiable. For certain professions it is not the employer who decides on the qualification but the state. The State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation puts it in one sentence: "Recognition is required to practise certain professions in Switzerland." Which professions those are is not in the advert; it is on recognition.swiss, where you look up your own. For a regulated profession the friendliest wording in an advert grants no room at all. For an unregulated one, even a hard-worded qualification is a single employer's decision — which is a different thing from a legal gate, and worth knowing which of the two you are facing.

3. Read the language line for whose language is meant

Languages are the requirement type softened most often: 30.7 per cent of mentions sit in a sentence with a soft word. The average hides the actual rule, though, because it pools four different languages. Taken separately, German is softened in 24.0 per cent of its mentions, English in 26.0, French in 40.4 and Italian in 54.7 per cent. A language line is therefore not one kind of requirement but two.

The reason becomes visible as soon as you split by the language the advert is written in, and the pattern is almost a mirror image. In German-language adverts German is softened in only 17.8 per cent of its mentions, while French is softened in 55.4. In French-language adverts it reverses: French 24.3 per cent, German 55.1. Each language region requires its own language and wishes for the other. Knowing that, you read "French an asset" in a Zurich advert correctly — as a tie-breaker — and "very good German required" in the same advert equally correctly, as a gate.

This matters more if you are applying from outside Switzerland, because the two lines look alike in an English-language posting and are not. A hard language line is the point at which an application fails most quietly, before anyone assesses anything you can do. A softened second national language, by contrast, is the cheapest extra point a Swiss dossier knows — provided it appears as a level and not as an adjective. "French B1, used daily" is information; "basic French" is a follow-up question.

4. Treat years as an order of magnitude, not a threshold

Professional experience is by far the most frequently named requirement: 72.9 per cent of employers name it. It is at the same time the second most frequently softened — 28.8 per cent of those mentions sit in a sentence with a soft word, and that holds steady across the language regions. Together those two figures give the single most useful rule of thumb in the whole requirement block: almost every advert wants experience, and almost every third one says in the same sentence that there is room to move.

A second observation comes out of the same count. Where a soft word stands beside a number of years, it often does not attach to the base requirement at all but to an addition: a completed degree, "ideally supplemented by several years" in one particular sub-field. That is exactly the place where dossiers give up too early. The base requirement is meetable; the addition is the wish — and the wish is written as a wish.

For the decision this means: reason about years in orders of magnitude rather than thresholds. An application with four years instead of five rarely fails on the number; it fails because nobody in the dossier can see what those four years consisted of. So do not write the duration, write what demonstrably happened inside it: scope of responsibility, size, outcome. If half the years are missing and the field is a different one as well, it is no longer a gap — it is another profession.

5. Separate the tools from the driving licence — one is learnable, the other is a gate

Software skills are named by 18.5 per cent of employers and softened in 24.5 per cent of those cases. That is the middle zone: harder than languages, considerably softer than the qualification. It is also the requirement type where the wording gives away the most. A tool that appears in the same line as the core task is a working instrument you need on day one; one that appears at the end of the list with "an asset" is a saving for the employer, not a condition on you.

The driving licence behaves the other way round, which is what makes it the useful counterpoint. It is named by only 5.1 per cent of employers, and where it does appear a soft word stands next to it in just 17.3 per cent of cases. The reason is not strictness but logic: a licence is a fact with two states, not a degree. You can be "solid" at Excel; you either hold a licence or you do not. Requirements built that way — licences, permits, admissions, register entries — are always gates in an advert, however casually they are phrased.

That gives you the sorting that saves the most work: check the two-state requirements first, the graded ones second. If a gate is shut, the whole application is already decided and no phrasing in a cover letter changes it. If every gate is open, what remains is a question of degree — and degree is the area where a good dossier genuinely moves something.

6. Count how many conditions are actually stated

A requirement block looks longer than it is. Counted across five requirement types — qualification, languages, professional experience, software, driving licence — 13.5 per cent of employers name none of them, 32.4 per cent exactly one and 30.2 per cent two. Three or more appear in 23.9 per cent, one advert in four. The median is two. What inflates the list visually are traits — independent, resilient, a team player, communicative — and those are not requirements but adjectives nobody can verify before an interview.

That figure is the most effective answer to the feeling of not being good enough. If ten points are listed and two of them are verifiable conditions, the application is decided on two points, not ten. The other eight are the part the employer wrote most freely and on which nobody keeps score during selection.

The practical step takes a minute: write the conditions that survived steps 1 to 5 underneath each other on one sheet. There are rarely more than three. That short list is what your dossier will be checked against — and it is simultaneously the outline of your cover letter, because every line on it demands one piece of evidence from your own history.

7. Check your dossier against the hard points — then decide

Only now does the CV come in, and against the short list from step 6 rather than against the whole advert. For every hard condition, one place in the dossier where it is evidenced: with the period, the employer and the outcome. If you find nothing for a condition, that is not a reason to slip the word into the CV anyway — it is the information that you have a real gap. Two evidenced out of three conditions is a good starting position. Zero out of three is a different job.

There is a yardstick for this check that does not come from the employer. The Code of Obligations draws a line, in Article 328b, around what an employer may handle about you at all: only data "to the extent that such data concern the employee's suitability for his job or are necessary for the performance of the employment contract". As a reading aid for an advert that sentence is more precise than any careers column. What describes suitability for this particular job is the requirement you will be measured against. What does not is decoration — in the advert as much as in your dossier.

That leaves the decision, and it is more honest split into two questions. Are all the gates open — licence, permit, recognition, a hard-worded language? And of the graded points, is more than half evidenced? Two yeses mean apply, even with the soft points missing; those exist to separate two equivalent dossiers and exclude nobody. One no means putting the hour into a different advert, which is not capitulation but the reason the previous six steps exist.

If you would rather not do the comparison by hand: our CV check takes your dossier and the text of one specific advert and shows which of its requirements are evidenced in the CV and which are not. You can try it without an account; we ask for one only when you save and from the second document.