How do I avoid clichés in a cover letter?

Updated: 23 August 2026

In short

Treat a cliché as a counting problem rather than a taste problem. A phrase is a cliché when the same words already sit in a large share of the market. Across the live English-language adverts on SwissJobs.app, «dynamic» appears in 31.3 per cent, «innovative» in 17.3 per cent and «communication» in 13.7 per cent. A specific term like «SQL» appears in 0.9 per cent and «Kubernetes» in 0.7. So delete any sentence that could be pasted into a different application unchanged, and write down the thing that made you reach for the adjective instead.

This is why no thesaurus fixes the problem. Swapping «team player» for «collaborative» trades one common word for a slightly rarer one while making exactly the same unverifiable claim. The person reading has already met that claim in every other file on the pile. They cannot check it and cannot argue with it, so they skip past it and look for something they can act on.

The good news is that avoiding clichés needs no particular gift for writing. It needs the willingness to put down the event instead of the verdict: not «I work well under pressure», but what you actually did on the week it mattered. The sentence gets longer and less impressive-sounding, and it stops being transferable to the next employer, which is the whole point.

How many adverts a single word matches

Share of live English-language adverts on SwissJobs.app whose description text contains the word or one of its forms. The upper group is the usual character vocabulary; the lower five are specific terms shown for comparison. August 2026.

«I am a team player» → give the size of the team, your role in it and what came out at the end.
«I am flexible» → give the workload you can take and your earliest start date; 22.1 per cent of live adverts already carry a percentage figure in the title for you to answer.
«I have good language skills» → give the level the advert asks for; 84 per cent of all stated language requirements come with a professional-level label rather than a vague «good».
«I work independently» → name a decision you took without asking, and who would otherwise have taken it.
«Your company is innovative» → the word is already in 17.3 per cent of English-language adverts; name the one thing you actually read on the company's own pages.
«I am looking for a new challenge» → say which task in the advert you mean and why it is one for you.

A cliché is a high-frequency word, not a stylistic slip

The standard advice against clichés is to write «authentically», which is useless because it gives you nothing to test a single sentence against. There is a test, and it is countable: a word is a cliché when a large slice of the market is using it at the same moment, so it separates nothing.

That distribution is measurable in the live adverts. In the English-language part of the index, roughly one advert in three uses «dynamic», one in six «innovative», one in seven the vocabulary around communication. «Flexible» sits at 6.5 per cent, «independent» or «autonomous» at 4.3, «passionate» at 2.4, «challenging» at 2.1, «team player» or «teamwork» at 1.5, «detail-oriented» at 1.2 and «proactive» at 0.5 per cent.

Specific vocabulary in the same adverts behaves completely differently. «Python» sits at 3.3 per cent, «SAP» at 1.5, «SQL» at 0.9, «Kubernetes» at 0.7. The gap between the commonest character word and an ordinary technical term is more than an order of magnitude, and that gap is exactly the difference between a sentence that fits thousands of vacancies and one that fits this one.

The swap test: change two names, then read it again

Take your draft and replace the employer's name and the job title with something entirely different — a fiduciary office instead of a manufacturer, a care home instead of an engineering practice. Read the letter again. Every sentence that survives the operation intact is a cliché and can go. What is left is the part that genuinely answers this advert.

The test is harsh, but it is the check that actually happens on the other side. A Swiss staffing agency described the failure case on LinkedIn in exactly those terms: a standard letter that would have suited a fiduciary office, an industrial firm or a care home equally well, sent without any visible link to the advertised work.

In most drafts the swap test takes out the whole middle. That is not bad news. A letter with two evidenced paragraphs is stronger than one with five general ones. arbeit.swiss describes the cover letter as your personal business card, giving the employer an overview of your skills, qualifications and motivation for an advertised position. Those last three words are the constraint: for that position, not for positions in general.

What goes in the adjective's place

Three forms make a claim checkable, and none of them is clever. The first is the episode: a place, a period, an action. Not «I am resilient», but the week two colleagues were off and you covered their shifts, with the number of shifts stated.

The second is the number. It does not have to be large and certainly not impressive; it only has to be true and to sound like something you could be asked about. How many files you handled in a week, how many sites you were responsible for, what share of the month-end close you did yourself. A small precise figure travels further than a big adjective.

The third is third-party attribution. The official Swiss model letters use it openly: rather than «I am well organised», the SDBB template has the candidate write that her teachers say she organises herself well and delivers work on time and to a good standard. Same content, but with a source attached — and therefore something an interviewer can follow up on.

The specific material is in the advert, and it is rare

Most clichés appear because people hunt for qualities in an empty room instead of reading the advert for requirements. The advert is surprisingly rich in precise detail. Across the whole live index, 72.8 per cent of adverts name at least one required language and one in five names two or more. Those requirements are graded: 84 per cent of all stated language requirements are at professional working level, 11.7 per cent at conversational level, 2.9 per cent at native level and 1.4 per cent at basic level.

That disposes of the commonest language cliché on its own. «Good English» is a self-assessment with no yardstick; the level the advert asks for is a statement that either matches the requirement or does not. Write the required level down and attach the certificate, the school or the job where you worked in that language.

The same applies to availability. 22.1 per cent of live adverts already put a workload percentage in the title, 90.5 per cent state an employment type, and virtually all of them name the employer. Writing «I am flexible» where a figure is being asked for throws away the easiest specific sentence in the entire letter.

Even the official model letters walk into the trap

The model letters published by the Swiss careers service are instructive precisely because they are not cliché-free. The second German example runs a pure string of adjectives: an open, communicative and reliable person with a quick grasp of things, teamwork being one of his strengths. Not one of those statements is checkable, and every one of them could sit in any other file.

The third model letter does it differently. It names the year the housing cooperative was founded, the administrative tasks done in Excel at a placement, and the subjects of the current preparatory school year listed one by one. The French-language set goes further still: incoming deliveries checked, sorted alphabetically and filed; customer calls listened in on; a customer email answered together with the apprentice.

The letters differ in method, not in talent. One lists qualities, the other lists events. If you are unsure about your own draft, hold it next to those two and ask which of them it resembles.

Not every repetition is a cliché

Do not turn the swap test loose on the whole letter, or you will cut the parts that are supposed to stay the same. arbeit.swiss lists the formal elements a cover letter normally contains: your postal address, the company's address, the date, the subject heading, the opening salutation, the closing greeting and the signature. Those are convention, not statements about you, and they should be executed exactly as expected.

«Dear Ms Muster» is not a cliché, it is the correct salutation. «Kind regards» is not a cliché, it is the standard closing. The subject line should carry the job title exactly as the advert words it — there, copying verbatim is precisely what is wanted.

The line falls where a formula starts making a claim about you. «I look forward to hearing from you» is convention. «I am looking forward to a new challenge in a dynamic environment» claims two things, evidences neither, and does it with a word that is already in 31.3 per cent of English-language adverts. The first sentence stays, the second does not.

The last pass before you send it

Read the finished letter with a pen and mark every character word that says something about you. Each mark then has exactly three futures: support it with an event, replace it with a figure, or delete it. There is no fourth, and «rephrase» is not one of them.

Do not be surprised when the letter gets shorter. It should. One page with two checkable paragraphs does the job arbeit.swiss assigns to the letter better than a full page of self-description: it gives an overview of skills and qualifications for this specific advert, and it demonstrates the ability to express yourself that the same page says the letter is there to show.

Then run the swap test once more, this time only over the two substantive paragraphs. If a sentence is still there that you could comfortably send to the next company as well, the work is not finished.

What people report

Standard letters are not spotted by their tone. They are spotted because they would have fitted three completely different employers equally well — a fiduciary office, an industrial firm, a care home. With no visible link to the advertised work, the file reads as volume applying.
Post by a Swiss staffing agency on LinkedIn, July 2026, about incoming applications with no connection to the role.
For applications from abroad, self-assessed soft skills and a missing link between the experience and the specific role are among the most frequently cited reasons for rejection — ahead of a genuine lack of experience.
Post by a Swiss life-sciences recruiter on LinkedIn, February 2026, listing recurring mistakes in application documents.

Word shares come from the ongoing analysis of live adverts on SwissJobs.app as of 22 August 2026. Each advert was counted once for whether its description text contains the word or one of its forms; the language split uses the detected advert language, and the English-language figures cover only adverts detected as English. Language requirements, employment type and employer come from the advert's structured fields, and the workload figure from the title line. All values are shares, never index sizes.

Cover letter for Switzerland: from this advert, free

Sources

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%

19% posted in the last 7 days · Largest markets: Zürich 18% · Bern 10% · Genève 5% · Basel 5%