I am applying for jobs in another part of Switzerland — what do I put on my CV if I do not live there yet?

Where the jobs actually are

Switzerland has a couple of thousand communes and a job market that sits in a few dozen of them. Among the open adverts on SwissJobs.app, 97.8% name a specific place of work and 2.0% say only "Switzerland" or "remote". Of those naming a place, 17.0% are in Zürich, 31.8% in the three largest places combined, and 50.2% in the ten largest.

The reverse of that figure is the useful one. Around a thousand distinct places appear as a place of work, but 61.5% of them carry fewer than five open adverts, and a third carry exactly one. Together they hold 5.7% of the market. Searching "jobs near me" from a village is not searching a small market — it is searching almost none of one.

Nothing dramatic follows from that, but something practical does: your search crosses a commune boundary from the first day, and that is the ordinary case rather than the awkward one. The CV does not have to apologise for it. It only has to state it so that nobody has to calculate.

Commuting is normal here — relocating is the exception

This is where applications from another region tend to over-promise. People offer to move immediately, because distance looks like the weakness in the file. The Federal Statistical Office describes a different country: in the 2024 survey year, eight in ten employed people were commuters, and 71% of them worked outside the commune they live in — considerably more than three decades earlier, when it was 58%.

The distances are shorter than the word suggests. The average work commute is 14.0 kilometres and 30.2 minutes one way; 49% drive, 31% use public transport, and 18% walk or cycle. To the person reading your dossier, half an hour of travel is not a risk factor — it is the average of their own workforce.

That inverts the argument you need to make. You do not have to prove willingness to relocate. You have to show that the journey works. Thirty-five minutes is unremarkable and should be stated as a plain fact; well over an hour becomes a real question, and then the answer belongs explicitly in the dossier rather than left to hope.

The address line, precisely

Name the commune and the canton, not the country. "Switzerland" answers nothing; "Solothurn SO" answers what is checked in the first seconds. If you hold a permit, it goes on the same line — permit B, C or G, or "EU/EFTA, no permit required". The two are read together, because together they settle whether hiring you starts a paperwork process.

Then the commute, in minutes, with the mode if it helps: "about 35 minutes to Bern by train". That is a checkable statement rather than an intention. Anyone can verify it against a timetable in ten seconds, which is exactly what makes it credible.

If the move is genuinely decided, give it as a date rather than a wish: "relocating to the Bern area on 1 November, on site from then." A date is a commitment. "I would be willing to relocate" is not, and is not read as one — it hands the whole uncertainty back to the reader.

What does not belong in that line: reasons. Why you ended up in the village, why you want out, how the flat search is going. That is interview material, and dead weight on the first page.

The language of the advert changes with the place

This is the figure that is written down almost nowhere and decides the most. Across all open adverts, 41.7% are written in German, 20.9% in English, 10.8% in French and 1.9% in Italian; for the rest the language is not determined.

Split by place of work, the picture is very uneven. In Zürich, 42.6% of adverts are in German and 37.0% in English. In Bern it is 60.4% German and 5.9% English; in Winterthur 78.2% German and 6.5% English; in Solothurn 69.8% German and 9.2% English. Genève tips the other way entirely — 42.5% English, 36.8% French, 1.0% German — and Lugano is 45.3% Italian and 27.4% English.

For someone arriving in Switzerland this is the single most useful cut of the data, because it is a choice you make once and live with. English-language adverts are 19.7% of the whole market, and 31.2% of them are in Zürich; the five largest places hold 57.1% of them. Choosing a town where English adverts are rare does not make your search harder by a little. It removes most of the market before you write a single application.

It is worth checking the stated language requirement too, separately from the language the advert happens to be written in: 66.2% of open adverts name a language requirement at all, and of those 65.8% ask for German, 45.0% for English, 22.1% for French and 3.8% for Italian.

Remote work does not usually solve it

The obvious escape — stay where you live and work remotely — is on offer far less often than the discussion about it suggests. Home office, remote or hybrid working appears in 5.3% of open adverts. That is not a claim about how often people actually work from home; it is how often the possibility is written into the advert as an offer or a condition.

Two consequences. Filtering on remote work cuts your list to a small remainder and hides roles that simply do not mention it. And if remote work is decisive for you, it is a first-interview question rather than a search filter — asked there it costs nothing, used here it costs nineteen adverts in twenty.

Relocation support is rare for the same reason and works no better as a filter; how rare, and what the other mentions of the word actually turn out to be, is counted on our page about Swiss jobs with relocation support.

What to do this week

Take a map and a timetable and fix which places you can reach in 45 minutes. That is your target list, and it is usually larger than expected, because the network is dense. Rank it by the number of adverts, not by preference.

Put the address line on the CV: commune and canton, permit, commute, availability date. One line, at the top, ahead of everything else.

Check the language of the adverts in each target place before committing to a region. It is the cheapest filter available and it prevents two months of applications into a market that works in a language you do not offer.

Then write the CV per advert rather than per region. The median advert has been open about a month, so speed matters less than fit with the text of the posting — the tasks, the workload in per cent, the language, the location. That is what our CV editor is built to do.