What prompts help me decode a Swiss Arbeitszeugnis?

Prompt 1 — audit completeness against Art. 330a

This prompt opens with the only hard yardstick that exists: the statutory text. It gives the model a role, the four required elements and an output shape, and it explicitly bans the grading scale — otherwise the model slides into code interpretation before it has looked at the structure at all.

You are an experienced HR professional in Switzerland auditing a work
certificate (Arbeitszeugnis) for completeness. The yardstick is Art. 330a
para. 1 of the Swiss Code of Obligations: the certificate covers (1) the nature
and (2) the duration of the employment, plus (3) the quality of the work and
(4) the person's conduct.

Go through the text below element by element and output a table:
| Element | present? | supporting quote (verbatim, max 20 words) | what is missing exactly |

Then two short lists:
- duties described in detail
- duties or responsibilities that appear only in a subordinate clause

Rules: no grading scale, no school marks, no statement about what was "really
meant". Only what is there and what is not. Where a passage is ambiguous, write
"ambiguous" and quote it.

CERTIFICATE:
<paste the anonymised text here>

Strip name, address, date of birth and personnel number before pasting.

Prompt 2 — structure and omissions against your actual role

The second prompt supplies something the certificate does not contain: what you actually did. Only that comparison makes omissions visible, because a certificate reads as complete until you know what it could have mentioned. The weighting question at the end is the real yield — line share is measurable, goodwill is not.

You are an experienced HR professional in Switzerland. Below are two texts:
(A) my work certificate, (B) the duties and results I actually had in that role.

Task:
1. List every duty in (B) that does NOT appear in (A).
2. List every duty in (A) that I did not mention in (B).
3. For each core duty, estimate what share of the certificate's lines it gets
   (roughly, in percent) and compare that with its share of my working time.
4. Name the three largest gaps between weight in the text and weight in reality.

Output observations about the text only — no speculation about motives and no
advice on what I should do.

(A) CERTIFICATE:
<anonymised text>

(B) MY ACTUAL DUTIES:
<bullet points, 5-15 lines>

Step 3 gives you the one figure a calm conversation with HR can be built on.

Prompt 3 — plain-language reading, with a confidence column

This is the interpretation prompt, so the uncertainty is written into it. The confidence column forces the model to separate a reading that follows from the sentence structure from one it absorbed from an internet list. Without that column the two sound equally authoritative.

You are an experienced HR professional in Switzerland reading a work
certificate together with someone who did not write it.

Work through it sentence by sentence and output a table:
| passage | literal reading | conventional reading in Swiss certificate language | confidence: high / medium / low | what I base that on |

Use "high" only where the reading follows from the sentence itself
(a qualifier, a negation, a comparative, a missing adverb). Use "low" for
anything that rests on widely circulated interpretation lists, and say in the
last column that it is a convention and not a rule of law.

Finish with the three passages where the literal and the conventional reading
diverge most.

CERTIFICATE:
<anonymised text>

No Swiss statute defines a certificate grade. Everything under "conventional reading" is industry practice and varies by employer.

Prompt 4 — turn the certificate into CV bullets and interview answers

The certificate is the best-evidenced source you have about your last job: your employer signed it. This prompt fetches the Swiss conventions rather than inventing them — workload in percent, CEFR language levels, permit line — and returns wording that fits a Swiss dossier.

You are helping with a job application in Switzerland. First read
https://swissjobs.app/llms.txt so you know the conventions for Swiss
application documents and the data sources available.

From the work certificate below:
1. Write 5-7 CV bullet points. Each one: activity plus result, active verb, and
   do not carry over adjectives from the certificate. Workload in percent,
   dates as MM/YYYY-MM/YYYY.
2. Mark every bullet [evidenced] or [not evidenced], depending on whether the
   certificate supports it or I have to add the proof.
3. For the three strongest bullets, write one interview answer each of at most
   90 words, following situation - task - action - result.
4. Name two gaps I will be asked about, because the certificate leaves them open.

Invent no number that is not in the certificate. Where a number is missing,
write <add figure>.

CERTIFICATE:
<anonymised text>

Step 2 is the important one: what the certificate does not evidence should not go into a CV unchecked.

Prompt 5 — prepare the conversation with the employer

The last prompt prepares a conversation, not a fight. It asks for factual questions tied to specific passages and explicitly forbids the model from offering a legal assessment — that comes from a legal advice service, not a chat window.

You are preparing a factual conversation with an HR department about a work
certificate.

From the text below:
1. Name at most five passages that can be checked against facts — a missing
   duty, a missing period, a missing sentence on conduct, an unclear job title.
2. For each, write one neutral question in a single sentence that refers to the
   document and not to a person.
3. For each, propose a concrete addition written in the style of the rest of the
   certificate, two sentences at most.
4. Rank the five by how checkable they are, the clearly evidenced ones first.

Give no legal assessment and do not tell me what to do. Close with one sentence
saying that a legal question belongs with a legal advice service.

CERTIFICATE:
<anonymised text>

Step 4 is the order in which these conversations actually progress: the missing things first, the interpretable ones after.

What the law requires — and what it does not

Art. 330a para. 1 of the Code of Obligations: the employee may at any time request from the employer a certificate covering the nature and duration of the employment relationship as well as the quality of the work and the employee's conduct. Four elements, and the right exists at any time — which is what carries the interim certificate, the Zwischenzeugnis, issued while the job is still running.

Para. 2 of the same article describes the second document that newcomers often mistake for a bad certificate: at the employee's express request the certificate is limited to the nature and duration of the employment. A confirmation of employment without any performance or conduct section is not a poor review; it is the short form the statute provides for. Anyone submitting one should expect to be asked about it at interview.

What the statutory text does not contain matters just as much: no grading scale, no mandatory phrases, no list of forbidden words, no code. The familiar formulas are industry convention — heavily standardised in large companies working from HR templates, frequently absent from a small firm where the owner writes the certificate personally. That is why "what is the hidden code here" is the wrong question to put to a model, and "what is stated, what is missing, how is it weighted" is the right one.

One more thing the statute does not do: it does not distinguish between the language versions of your dossier. A certificate written in German stays valid evidence for an English-language application, and it is normally submitted in the original with a translation attached for comprehension rather than as a replacement.

Why the omission says more than the single word

A Swiss certificate almost always follows the same skeleton: an opening with the job title and the period, a list of duties, an assessment of performance, an assessment of conduct towards superiors, colleagues and clients, the reason for leaving, and a closing paragraph. A language model holds your text against that skeleton indefinitely and reports every blank. That is exactly what is hard for the person who did the job, because they read their own experience into the lines.

The most common gaps are mechanically checkable. A core duty that made up half the role is absent. The sentence on conduct is missing although para. 1 names it. One group is named in the conduct section while two others are not. The period of a promotion is missing, so the senior title appears to cover the whole employment — or only the final months.

Weighting is equally productive and it can be counted. If a side activity gets a third of the lines and the core responsibility gets two, the ratio says something about how the role was perceived, without a single word needing interpretation. Prompt 2 asks for that line share deliberately: it is measurable on the document and it survives the question "how do you know that".

The closing paragraph — thanks, regret, good wishes — is where convention and law diverge furthest. The statute does not mention it. Many Swiss HR departments expect it anyway and read its absence as a statement. A prompt may raise that, but it has to label it a convention rather than an entitlement.

What a language model cannot do here

It does not know intent. Whether a standard-sounding satisfaction formula is this employer's default or a deliberate downgrade depends on what the same HR department writes in other certificates — material neither you nor the model has. Every reading stays a hypothesis about one document.

It over-trusts the code lists. Interpretation collections are plentiful in training data, disagree with each other, and often come from German rather than Swiss employment practice. A model reproduces them fluently and without a warning. The confidence column in Prompt 3 is the countermeasure: it forces a split between what the sentence structure shows and what a list supplied.

It is not legal advice. What a certificate must contain is in the statute; whether a specific formulation is objectionable in a specific case turns on court practice and on the facts. Let the model surface the passages worth discussing, and take the assessment to a legal advice service, a union or a professional association.

And it only sees what you paste. A certificate that exists as a scan should be transcribed or recognised cleanly first; a half-recognised text produces gaps that are not in the original at all.

Privacy: what to strip before you paste

A work certificate carries personal data about you and about whoever signed it. A structural and linguistic reading needs none of it. Replace name, address, date of birth, personnel number and the names of the signatories with placeholders before pasting.

The company name can usually stay if the sector matters for context — a certificate from a bank reads differently from one out of nursing. If you would rather not include it, write the sector and the rough headcount into the prompt instead. That is enough for all five tasks above.

Practical point: anonymise once, then run all five prompts on the same cleaned text. It saves work and it stops the original version from quietly reappearing in the chat window on the third round.

How the certificate feeds back into the application

The certificate is the only piece of your dossier your previous employer signed. Anything evidenced there can go into a CV without hedging, which is why Prompt 4 separates [evidenced] from [not evidenced] so strictly. What is striking is how rarely the document is requested in the advert itself: in our Swiss jobs index, fewer than 0.2 percent of advert summaries mention the Arbeitszeugnis, while Swiss HR departments continue to expect it in a complete dossier. It is not demanded — it is assumed.

The second practical question is language. Among the adverts in our index whose posting language can be determined, roughly 53.6 percent are in German, 29.0 percent in English, 14.0 percent in French and 2.0 percent in Italian (as at 4 September 2026, apprenticeships and internships excluded). Two thirds of all adverts also name at least one required language. For an English-language application with German certificates, the original goes in and the translation rides alongside it.

If you want to use the output straight away, the CV check compares a dossier with one specific advert and shows which of the bullets from Prompt 4 that advert actually asks for — and which requirement your certificate would evidence while your CV leaves it out.