Which prompts help me read a Swiss job advert properly?

Prompt 1: must, nice-to-have, ambiguous, missing

The first pass sorts requirements by how binding they are - and opens a fourth list for what the advert does NOT say. That fourth list is the valuable one: a missing workload or a missing language level is not sloppiness, it is something the employer intends to settle in conversation.

You are a recruiter working in the Swiss labour market. Read the job advert below and split it into exactly four lists:
1. MUST - requirements the advert states as binding ("required", "essential", "a prerequisite").
2. NICE TO HAVE - requirements phrased as a wish ("an advantage", "ideally", "desirable").
3. AMBIGUOUS - wording that can be read two ways. Give both readings.
4. NOT STATED - what an advert for this kind of role usually contains and this one does not: workload (Pensum in per cent), language level, who the role reports to, start date, whether the contract is fixed-term, exact place of work.

Rules:
- Quote the exact wording for every item. If there is no wording, the item belongs in list 4.
- Do not add a requirement that is not in the text, and do not fill gaps with what is normal in the industry.
- Give each item a confidence: high / medium / low.
Output one table: requirement | category | quote | confidence.

ADVERT:
<<<paste the full advert text here>>>

Do not drop the confidence column. It forces the model to mark a guess as a guess instead of writing it up as a requirement.

Prompt 2: language and workload, tested separately

In Switzerland these two lines decide more rejections than the technical requirements do, and both are usually written imprecisely. So the prompt keeps the advert's language apart from the job's working language, and treats a workload range as an open question rather than a number.

Read the same advert again, this time only for language and workload.

LANGUAGE:
- Which languages does the advert require, and at what level? Map every statement to a CEFR level (A1-C2) and say whether that level is written in the text or estimated by you.
- Keep two things strictly apart: the language the advert is WRITTEN in, and the language the job is WORKED in. Report both separately.
- Flag vague wording ("good German", "native speaker", "business fluent") as imprecise and draft the question I should ask in a first call.

WORKLOAD:
- Is a workload stated in the title or the body? Quote it.
- For a range such as 80-100%: list the three usual reasons for a range (the employer prefers full time but will take less, the volume of the role is not settled, the role can be shared) and write one question that establishes which applies here.
- If no workload is stated, write "not stated" - never assume 100%.

Output: two short blocks, then at most three questions for me to ask.

ADVERT:
<<<paste>>>

"Not stated" has to be an allowed answer: a third of adverts give no language level, and a model told to fill that gap will invent a requirement.

Prompt 3: who is actually hiring

An advert does not necessarily come from the employer. Agencies post the same role repeatedly, and the application route shows where the dossier really lands. This prompt looks for that evidence in the text and in the link instead of assuming it.

Work out WHO is actually hiring, using only the advert text and the application link.

Answer:
1. Is the sender the employer or a recruitment agency? Give the evidence ("our client", "for an established company", an application address that does not belong to the named company).
2. Does the application link go to the employer's own website or to a third-party applicant system? What does that mean for the format and file size of my documents?
3. Is a named contact person given? If yes: their role, and whether a direct approach is appropriate.
4. Is this a replacement or a newly created position? Quote the passage that suggests it, or write "cannot be inferred".
5. How large is the team, who does the role report to, how many management layers are visible?

No guessing. Every answer carries either a quote or "cannot be inferred".

ADVERT AND LINK:
<<<paste>>>

A useful companion check: search the exact job title in quotation marks. If it appears under several company names, an agency mandate is likely.

Prompt 4: requirement against evidence

Only here does the CV enter. The prompt compares line by line and explicitly forbids inventing a role - the most common damage AI does to an application. It is also the only one of the five that reads an external source.

First fetch https://swissjobs.app/llms.txt and use the pages it links to whenever you need to check a Swiss convention (work permit line, CEFR language levels, workload in per cent, Arbeitszeugnis, the two-page dossier). Where a fact is missing, write "not stated" rather than guessing.

Then set requirement against evidence:
- Column 1: every MUST and NICE-TO-HAVE requirement from the advert.
- Column 2: the most concrete evidence from my CV (employer, period, number or result).
- Column 3: verdict - evidenced / partly evidenced / not evidenced.
- Column 4: for "partly" or "not", the closest honest substitute, without inventing a role I never held.

Finish by counting how many MUST requirements are evidenced, and say in two sentences whether applying is worth it and what it depends on.

MY CV:
<<<paste>>>

ADVERT:
<<<paste>>>

The reference to our orientation file only earns its place when the model has to look up a Swiss convention. For a pure matching task the prompt works without it.

Prompt 5: save the advert, and turn it into questions

Postings come down, often before the answer arrives - and then the text you need for the interview, for a follow-up call and for your own records is gone. This prompt turns the advert into one page that stays.

Turn the advert into a one-page record that stays useful after the posting comes down.

Produce:
1. A header: company, role, place of work, workload, start date, application deadline, contact person, link, today's date. Missing fields as "not stated".
2. The full advert text, unchanged, as a quoted block.
3. The ten terms the advert uses for the work itself - in its wording, not mine.
4. Six interview questions this advert makes likely, each paired with the item from my CV that answers it.
5. Three questions for me to ask at the end that show I read the advert.

Format it so I can file it as a single page.

ADVERT:
<<<paste>>>

The ten terms from point 3 are the vocabulary that belongs in the application. Describing the work in your own synonyms scores worse against any keyword-based pre-selection.

Why an advert has to be read, not scanned

A job advert is not a specification. It is a piece of persuasion with a legal edge, written by people who want the role filled, mixing wishes with conditions and leaving gaps exactly where the company wants room to negotiate. Read as a checklist, it stops you applying, because a wish looks like a condition. Skimmed, it produces the dossier that would have fitted three other adverts equally well - the single most common complaint from people who sift applications here.

Language models are well suited to this job because they hold apart distinctions a reader glides over: "required" against "an advantage", "native speaker" against "good knowledge", "immediately" against "by arrangement". What they are bad at is leaving a gap alone. Unless you tell them otherwise, they complete the advert with what similar adverts usually contain - and hand you a plausible, invented profile. That is why every prompt below carries the same instruction: quote it, or write "not stated".

The language of the advert is not the language of the job

This is the most expensive misreading in Switzerland, and nothing in the text warns you about it. In our index, among adverts written in English that state a language requirement, 25.7 per cent also require German and 11.9 per cent French; about a third require a national language alongside English. It runs the other way too: 35.7 per cent of Italian-language adverts with a requirement name German, and 25.4 per cent of French-language ones do. An English advert is not evidence of an English-speaking team. Often it only means the company recruits internationally.

Then there is the vagueness of the levels themselves. Where a requirement is stated at all, 78.1 per cent are set at professional level, 16.9 per cent at conversational level and only 3.7 per cent at native level. "Good German" is not a level, it is an opening position. Prompt 2 maps every statement onto a CEFR level and marks whether that level was written down or estimated, so you can see at a glance what has to be settled in the first call.

And a third of adverts state no language requirement at all. That is not an all-clear. It means the question arrives in conversation instead - which matters most to readers applying from outside Switzerland, who tend to assume that an advert they can read is an advert for a job they can do in that language.

What "80-100%" actually means

A workload appears in 23.9 per cent of advert titles, and the most frequent value there is not 100% but the range 80-100%: it shows up in 9.6 per cent of all titles, against 6.1 per cent for a flat 100%. If you are arriving from a market where part time is the exception that has to be justified, this looks odd. In Switzerland the range is a normal opening offer, and the workload - the Pensum - is stated in per cent the way a salary band is stated elsewhere.

But the range carries more than one meaning. It can mean: we prefer 100% and will accept 80. It can mean: the volume of the role is not settled yet. It can mean: the role can be split between two people. Prompt 2 therefore asks for a question rather than an interpretation, because which of the three applies is never in the text - and it is one of the few things you can safely ask about before applying.

The gender marker in the title - m/w/d and its variants - appears in 27.2 per cent of titles and says nothing about the work. It is still a signal: it tells you the advert came out of an HR department working from standard templates, and those adverts run through an applicant system rather than an email inbox more often.

Who placed the advert

10.1 per cent of open adverts share their exact title with an advert at a different employer. Some of that is simply common job titles; some of it is agency mandates in which one role is advertised several times over. For an application it matters: with an agency the dossier goes to an intermediary first, the company name often appears late, and approaching the end client directly can cut across the mandate.

The application route is the second clue. Two of three application links in our index point at neither a known applicant system nor one of the large boards, but at another host - typically the employer's own site. Anyone who assumes a machine screens everything is planning around half the market. Prompt 3 reads both facts out of the text and the link instead of guessing at them.

What the advert leaves out because it does not have to say it

Some of what an advert withholds is deliberate; some of it is systemic. The systemic part is the job registration requirement: for occupations with high unemployment, employers have to register vacancies with the responsible regional employment centre (RAV) before advertising them publicly, on the basis of an annually published list of occupation types. Jobseekers signed on with the RAV and registered on Job-Room see those vacancies first; only afterwards may they be published elsewhere.

In practice: a publicly visible advert in one of those occupations may already have been open for some days, and part of the market is visible only through the official platform for a while. No prompt can derive that from the advert text - it is simply the reason not to confine a search to public portals.

Pay is the other routine omission, and in Switzerland it is the norm rather than a red flag. Across the summaries of the adverts in our index, pay or an amount is mentioned in only 3.6 per cent of cases. Readers arriving from markets with mandatory salary ranges consistently misread that silence.

From advert to application, without invention

The fourth prompt is the only one that involves the CV, and it is deliberately strict: one column for the requirement, one for the most concrete piece of evidence, one for the verdict, one for the honest substitute. Inventing a role is forbidden. That sounds obvious and is not - a model asked to close a gap will close it, and then an experience that never happened is sitting in the dossier when the interview starts.

The value of the table is less the table than the count at the end: how many of the binding requirements are actually evidenced? That number answers the question people otherwise settle by instinct - whether to apply at all. It also hands you the structure of the letter, because every evidenced line can become a paragraph.

If you would rather not do the matching by hand, our CV check compares a dossier against one specific advert on Swiss criteria and names the gaps. The prompts above are written to work entirely without us, in any chat window.

Save the advert before it disappears

Adverts are taken down as soon as the role is filled or the search is called off - frequently before any answer reaches you. With them goes the text the interview will refer to, and, for anyone registered with the RAV, the record of what was actually applied for. Prompt 5 therefore builds a one-page file: header with the key facts, the full text as a quotation, the advert's own vocabulary, the questions to expect.

One boundary for jobseekers claiming unemployment benefit: proof of job-search efforts is still submitted through Job-Room or the cantonal form. A private file does not replace that. It only makes sure the details still exist when the advert does not.

What these prompts cannot do

They read a text and nothing else. Whether the role is already promised internally, how many applications arrive, whether the manager is fair, how the team works - none of that is in the advert, and a model that answers those questions is inventing. Nor does an advert say how strictly the stated requirements will be applied in the actual process; people decide that case by case.

And the prompts do not replace a phone call. Where a contact person is named, one short concrete question - about the workload, the start date, the language spoken in the team - is almost always better spent than another round of analysis. The point of the prompts is to arrive with a good question instead of a general one.