How to use AI in your application without it showing

1. Split the work before you open the tool

One line decides everything that follows: the tool may do anything to do with form — structure, shorten, reorder, phrase the same sentence two ways, fix spelling and punctuation, move the tone from wordy to plain. It may do nothing to do with content: no date, no job title, no grade, no workload percentage, no language level, no company name.

The reason is mechanical rather than moral. A language model fills gaps because filling gaps is what it does. Leave out your start date and a plausible one appears; leave out the exact name of your role and a common one appears. Both look right in the draft and neither survives an interview, because the person opposite you has your reference letter on the table.

The one public Swiss instruction draws the same line, and it does so with a verb. The careers portal tells applicants they may have their letter "corrected" by an AI — corrected, meaning work on a text that already exists — and it places that sentence directly after the advice to show the letter to a teacher or another adult. Its natural reading is that the tool is the second reader, not the first writer.

In practice: write the division of labour into the chat as your first message, before anything else. "You phrase and structure. Every fact comes from the material I give you. If something is missing, ask me for it instead of filling it in." That single line prevents most of what would otherwise stand out.

2. Write your fact sheet before you ask for a draft

The fact sheet is a plain list, and it comes from documents rather than memory. It holds every job with the month you started and the month you left, the job title exactly as your Arbeitszeugnis writes it, the workload as a percentage, your qualifications with the year and the awarding institution, your languages with a level from A1 to C2, your permit if you do not hold a Swiss passport, and your notice period or earliest possible start date.

It costs about twenty minutes and it costs them once. After that the sheet is the source for every further application, and it doubles as the yardstick for the final check: every sentence in a draft has to trace back to a line in it.

One addition is worth making and almost nobody does: copy two or three sentences from your Swiss reference letters into the sheet verbatim. Those are phrases a Swiss employer has written about you, in the register this market actually uses. As raw material for a draft they are worth more than any instruction, because they carry the tone a general model only approximates.

If your references are foreign, the sheet is where you do the translation work yourself — the model should not decide that a German Ausbildung equals a Swiss EFZ or that a British degree maps onto a Fachhochschule. Write the original name, and the Swiss equivalent only where you actually hold a recognition.

3. Take out the names that are not yours

The official condition is unambiguous: remove personal details such as your address, and do not upload confidential material such as your CV. The second half sounds strict, but it points at a real problem — your documents contain other people’s data. A reference letter names managers, a project report names clients, a care record names patients, and in some professions professional secrecy applies on top.

Handling it is routine and takes two minutes. Replace names with placeholders — "manager A", "client B", "a hospital in canton X" — leave out addresses and dates of birth, and generalise project names that identify a customer. None of this weakens the draft, because a model needs the shape of your experience, not the identity of the people in it.

How seriously this question is taken here is visible in an example from Ticino. The cantonal administration translates documents containing private and sensitive information every day, and for its internal translation tool it deliberately chose an open Swiss model over a commercial one: it needed to be able to guarantee data protection and to know what the model had been trained on. Your application dossier is the same problem in miniature.

Swiss-built options now exist. Apertus, the open language model from EPFL, ETH Zurich and the national supercomputing centre, was published in September 2025; according to its makers it was developed with Swiss data protection and copyright law and the transparency requirements of the EU AI Act in mind, and its training data covers over a thousand languages, Swiss German and Romansh among them. A detail of the official application page is telling: the French version names ChatGPT, Claude, Apertus and Euria; the German and Italian versions name only ChatGPT.

4. Give the model the advert, not your summary of it

The words that make an application specific are already written down, in the posting. Summarising it before you hand it over throws away exactly the part that separates your application from a thousand others and leaves the model working from its average vocabulary. Paste the advert in full: title, tasks, requirements, company name.

The job title shows what happens otherwise. In the German-language adverts open in our index, 19.7 per cent of titles contain an English word — Engineer, Manager, Sales, Specialist — and 40.1 per cent of employers advertising in German have at least one such advert open. In French-language adverts it is 11.8 per cent of titles, in Italian-language ones 6.8, and in English-language ones 73.3. A model asked to produce "good German" turns a Sales Manager into a Vertriebsleiter, and the application ends up named differently from the job it is applying for.

That gradient is also a warning against the reverse move. Anglicising a title works in Zurich, where a fifth of German-language adverts already do it; in Ticino, where fewer than one advert title in fourteen carries an English word, the same instinct makes a dossier look imported. Follow the advert rather than a habit.

Company names behave the same way. They get regularised, a legal form is added or dropped, a symbol in the name disappears. This is not pedantry: 10.7 per cent of open adverts come from an employer that appears in our index under more than one spelling. The spelling that counts is the one in the advert.

The most productive instruction at this point is not a request for prose but for a mapping: "List every requirement in the advert and match each one to evidence from my fact sheet. Where I have no evidence, say so." What comes back is the map of your application — and the gaps in it are the sentences you are not allowed to write.

If you use our tools, the pasting step disappears: open the CV builder from a posting and the advert text is already there, and the draft is written against it. You can try it without an account; we ask for one when you save and from the second document, PDF and Word without a watermark, with five documents a day and ten per rolling week on a free account.

5. Generate in the language of the advert — never translate afterwards

The most reliable way to make an application look machine-made is to translate it. A letter thought in English and rendered into German carries English sentence rhythm with it; a CV drafted in German and turned into French carries German compounds. Both are obvious to someone who reads applications in their own language all day, and both are avoidable by drafting in the advert’s language from the first prompt.

This matters more here than in a single-language market. An advert in French is answered in French even when the company is headquartered in Bern and its website is German: the language of the posting is the language the process runs in. Whether you can apply at all is often decided by the same question, which is why the advert states its language requirements as levels rather than as "fluent".

Take the form of address from the advert instead of choosing one. German-language postings that address you informally with du expect the same back in the body of your letter; ones that use Sie expect Sie; ones that address nobody at all get Sie. A model has no useful opinion about this and will happily mix the two within one letter, which reads worse than either choice.

The English-language segment has its own trap. Plenty of Swiss adverts are written in English while the process, the reference letters and the employment rules stay Swiss. Answering an English advert in English is right; answering it with an American resume is not, and the difference is the subject of the next step.

6. Check the draft against the Swiss dossier, not against a resume

A general model produces the shape it has seen most often, and that shape is American: one page, no photo, no reference letters, a summary made of adjectives, skills drawn as bars. In Switzerland nearly every one of those points goes the other way, and the differences are expectations rather than taste.

The official summary is short enough to use as a checklist. The CV is chronological with the most recent entry first and runs to no more than three pages; the dossier holds the application letter, the CV with personal details and — conventionally here, unlike in the UK or the US — a photograph, plus Arbeitszeugnisse "complete and in chronological order", diplomas and certificates. References are normally given on request rather than printed. To that add the things that are self-evident here and appear in no international template: language levels from A1 to C2, the workload as a percentage, and, if you do not hold a Swiss passport, one line on your permit.

The letter has a fixed form too: sender address, recipient address, date, subject line, salutation, closing formula and signature. A model tends to drop half of these, because email prose is the more common pattern in its training material. Restoring them is the cheapest part of the check and the most conspicuous omission if you skip it.

Then cut. A generated letter grows, because every requirement in the advert gets its own paragraph. Two thirds of those paragraphs are claims without evidence, and a letter that fits on one page and makes three evidenced points beats a page that makes nine unevidenced ones.

7. Do the two passes nobody can do for you

The first pass runs against your documents. Put the draft and the fact sheet side by side and check every year, every job title, every workload figure, every language level and every company name one at a time. Anything that does not trace back to a line in the sheet gets deleted rather than softened. In practice this catches two to four places per draft, and they are rarely the conspicuous ones.

The second pass runs against the interview. Read each sentence and ask whether you could talk about it for five minutes: what exactly your role was, who else was involved, what the outcome was, what went wrong. The sentences where the answer thins out are the ones that come apart in the room — not because anyone detects a machine, but because the gap between the written claim and the spoken one is audible.

The side effect is the real prize. Anyone who does the second pass has already done half of their interview preparation, since the questions a Swiss recruiter asks are largely the ones you just put to yourself.

That leaves the question of what to say if you are asked directly. The usable answer is the plain one: structure and phrasing with a tool, content and figures from you, checked by you. That is not a confession, it is a description of how you work — and it matches what the official page recommends.