RAV & unemployment

How to track your applications and fill the RAV form in one go: seven steps

Updated: 5 September 2026

In short

Record every application on the day you send it, in exactly the shape the official form asks for: date, company with place and contact person, job title, workload, how you applied, outcome. Month-end then stops being a reconstruction and becomes one pass — open the sheet, pick the control period, check the rows, sign, and submit it by the fifth day of the following month where it legally counts: the Job-Room eService, or the channel your RAV names.

Only your RAV and the ruling of your unemployment fund are binding, and every case is assessed individually. This text is editorial, not legal advice.

Almost none of the work sits in applying. It sits in catching up afterwards. Anyone facing a month of browser tabs, sent mail and half-memories at the end of a control period is hunting for details that were all on screen at the moment of sending — who the application went to, under what title, for what workload, by which route. Some of it cannot be recovered at all, because it never appeared in the advert in the first place.

This guide walks through both halves in seven steps: the recording during the month, and the filling at the end of it. It draws on the official form itself, on arbeit.swiss and the canton of Zurich, and on our own count of the open Swiss advert stock on 5 September 2026, which shows what an advert hands you and what you decide yourself.

Share of advert titles that need no trimming before they fit the form line, by advert language

Open adverts on SwissJobs.app whose title carries no bracket, no gender marker and no percentage. Own count of the open Swiss advert stock, 5 September 2026; apprenticeship and training posts excluded on the title. Italian-language adverts are omitted deliberately: about half of their plain titles come from a single employer, so a language value would describe that firm rather than the market.

A row is created when you press send, not at month-end. Everything the form wants is in front of you at that moment.
The official form exists in German, French and Italian only. The English page of arbeit.swiss lists the jobseeker forms with the plain note that they are in German — so an English-speaking applicant fills a German, French or Italian sheet.
An advert title is not a job description. Titles in English-language adverts are the easiest to reuse: 69.6 per cent need no trimming at all, against 20.1 per cent of German-language ones.
English adverts rarely state a workload — only 8.0 per cent of their titles carry a percentage — so the Vollzeit/Teilzeit figure on your row is your own statement about the job you applied for.
Phone calls, personal visits and speculative applications all count and all appear on the form, but none of them leaves a trace in any portal. They exist only if you write them down the same day.
Keep the evidence. The notes on the form require written documents such as copies of applications or rejection letters to be retained and produced on request.
The sheet holds fourteen rows. More efforts in one month simply means a second sheet.
Only the official channel counts. A private tool prepares the proof; it is credited only once it reaches your RAV in time.

1. Set the sheet up before the month starts

The proof belongs to exactly one control period. The head of the sheet carries your name, your AHV number (the Swiss social-security number) and "month and year", which is why the date column below asks only for a day and a month. Set those three once and you never type them again. The AHV number is not free text: thirteen digits, written in groups of three, four, four and two, beginning with the country prefix seven-five-six, and the final digit is a check digit — a transposed pair shows up immediately if anyone checks, and never if nobody does.

The second decision is the language of the form. It exists in three versions — German, French and Italian — and you pick the one your canton and your adviser work in, not the one you speak best. There is no English edition: the English page of arbeit.swiss lists the forms for jobseekers with the explicit note "(in German)", which is worth knowing before the fifth of the month rather than on it.

The third decision is the channel, and it belongs at the start of the month. The canton of Zurich names four: online through the eServices, by email to your adviser, by post, or in person. For the online route it states that recorded efforts are transmitted to the RAV automatically overnight from the 5th to the 6th. Choose it and the deadline takes care of itself; choose one of the other three and you need a file and a signature on the day.

2. Record the application the day you send it

The moment of sending is the only one in which every detail is present at once: the advert, the address you wrote to, the person you addressed, the date. Afterwards it disperses. The contact person with a telephone number — a column of its own on the sheet — appears in almost no advert; it comes into existence through your application. Miss it that day and it is gone.

In practice: one row per application, immediately. In the application list on SwissJobs.app the row appears when you save a job and mark it as applied; the date stays put, and the list works without an account — signing up is asked for at download, not before. If you would rather keep your own spreadsheet, keep it with the columns of the official form. The mistake is never the tool. It is the timing.

Write the employer the way the advert writes it. In our count, roughly one employer in twenty-five appears in the open stock under more than one spelling — with a legal form and without it, with and without "Switzerland" in the name — which touches 10.9 per cent of open adverts; 13.1 per cent of names carry a legal form and 7.3 per cent a country word. What the row needs is a company you can still recognise in six months, not a tidy one.

3. Trim the advert title down to the function

The column is called "job title" and an advert headline is rarely one. How much trimming that costs depends almost entirely on the language the advert is written in. Of the English-language adverts open on 5 September 2026, 69.6 per cent carried nothing in the title beyond the function — no bracket, no gender marker, no percentage. In French-language adverts that share is 50.7 per cent, in German-language ones 20.1: nearly two thirds of German titles carry a gender marker such as (m/w/d), and 56.1 per cent carry a bracket of some kind.

What belongs on the row is what the company itself calls the work: "Senior Data Engineer", "Pflegefachfrau HF", "Sachbearbeiter Debitoren". What goes is the gender bracket, the workload, the location and the marketing. If you are applying across language borders in Switzerland — which most people in the German-speaking cantons end up doing — expect the German-language adverts to need the most editing before they fit a line.

Do not translate. A row that says "Senior Data Engineer" matches the advert, your application and any later query about it. A row that renders it into German matches nothing, and matching is the entire purpose of the field. The same holds for a French or Italian advert: it goes on the sheet in its own language, whatever language the sheet itself is printed in.

4. Decide the workload rather than copying it

The workload column offers two options: tick full-time, or tick part-time and write a percentage. Ticking is easy; the number is not. Only 23.8 per cent of open adverts state a percentage in the title at all, and among English-language adverts the figure falls to 8.0 per cent. Swiss adverts express workload as a Pensum in per cent rather than in hours per week, and where they state one it is often a span: of the titles that give a figure, 58.3 per cent give a range, most commonly 80 to 100 per cent.

A range cannot be copied. It is a question, and it is answered at the moment you apply: which workload did you apply for? That number goes on the row, and the same number should appear in your application letter. Set it at month-end instead and you are setting it from memory — which is how a row ends up disagreeing with the letter it describes.

There is a second-order effect worth knowing. The workloads across your rows are what shows whether your search matches the availability you registered with the RAV. A deviation is not an error — someone available full-time may of course apply for an eighty-per-cent role — but a pattern of them is visible on the sheet, and it explains itself better in a counselling session than in hindsight.

5. Record the efforts that leave no digital trace

The form knows three ways of applying — by letter or electronically, in person, and by telephone — and treats them as equal. Two of them leave nothing behind: a phone call to a company and a personal visit produce no confirmation mail, no portal entry and no document. They exist only if you write them down.

The same is true of a speculative application and of anything sent outside a job portal. In the application list you create such a row by hand — function, company, place, date, plus the field for the contact person — and it then appears in the form view like any other, where you tick which kind of effort it was.

The reason for "now, not later" is mundane and decisive: right after the call you know the name of the person you spoke to and the number you dialled. Two weeks later you know neither, and a row nobody can check is worthless as proof even though the effort genuinely happened.

6. Keep the outcome column honest — and keep the evidence

The outcome column has four states: still open, interview, hired, rejected with a reason. At month-end a large share of rows will legitimately read "still open" — that is not a weak proof, it is the normal state of an application two weeks old. What gets updated is what changes, when it changes. Interviews and rejections rarely arrive on the last day of the month, and someone collecting them all at once tends to attach one to the wrong application.

The second layer is written into the notes on the form itself: written documents such as copies of applications or rejection letters must be retained and produced on request. The sheet is the proof; the documents behind it are the file. A folder on your machine holding the file you sent and the answer you received is enough, as long as it is ordered by the same key as your rows.

This is also where a side effect appears that jobseekers describe again and again: it is their own records, not their inbox, that reveal which applications never produced any reaction at all — not even an acknowledgement of receipt. Those rows are the ones worth a polite follow-up, and the answer then fills the outcome column.

7. Month-end: one pass, not an evening

At the end of the month you open the form view, choose the control period and read from top to bottom. Are the name, AHV number and month right? Does every row carry a date, a company with a place, a function? Is the workload ticked, the type of application ticked, the outcome ticked? On SwissJobs.app the sheet fills itself from the applications recorded in the chosen month; the per-row ticks take a click each, and what downloads is the official form file itself, not a lookalike.

Two things are regularly forgotten. First the signature: it sits on the back, next to the date and the field for enclosures. Second the row count — fourteen rows to a sheet, and anything beyond that simply continues on a second one. The canton of Zurich also asks explicitly that no photographs of the form be sent: either the electronically filled document, or the hand-filled one, scanned.

Then the one step no private tool performs: submitting it. An effort is credited when the proof for the calendar month reaches the competent office by the fifth day of the following month — through the "Arbeitsbemühungen" eService, by email, by post or in person, depending on what your RAV specifies. Efforts submitted after that date can no longer be taken into account without an excusable reason. A tracker prepares the sheet. It replaces neither Job-Room nor your RAV.

What people report

Cantonal labour offices now promote the online route themselves: registering, recording job-search efforts and submitting documents all run through the same platform, while the forms for the unemployment fund are named as a separate second route. The practical reading is that the channel is not a matter of taste, and that the office and the fund are two different recipients.
Public announcement by a cantonal office for economy and labour on LinkedIn, April 2026, on the introduction of its eServices; reproduced as a pattern, without names.

Market figures: own count of the open Swiss advert stock on SwissJobs.app, 5 September 2026, apprenticeship and training posts excluded on the title (3.8 per cent). Form details read from the official form file published by arbeit.swiss; procedural details from arbeit.swiss and the canton of Zurich, retrieved on 5 September 2026.

Track applications — the RAV proof fills itself

Sources

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What our job index says about the Swiss market

Computed live from our own index, not quoted from a study. Shares only, as of today.

Language the advert is written in

Deutsch: 60%
English: 23%
Français: 13%
Italiano: 3%

Of adverts that state a language requirement, the share asking for

Deutsch: 70%
English: 43%
Français: 21%
Italiano: 3%

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