How do I check a CV for the Romandie?
Updated:
In short
Run six checks in this order: which of the region's two markets the advert belongs to, whether your title line copies the advert's French job title including its gender tag, whether accents and spelling hold up throughout, what the canton asks in German, whether the activity rate comes from you rather than the advert, and what state a foreign qualification is in. Among the Romandie adverts on SwissJobs.app, 16.0 per cent of job titles carry a tag of the form (h/f) against 1.7 per cent in the rest of the country, and working-level German is asked by 27.8 per cent of Fribourg adverts but only 7.7 per cent of Geneva ones.
French-speaking Switzerland is not a smaller copy of the German-speaking market with different vocabulary. It accounts for roughly a fifth of the open Swiss adverts we track, and inside that fifth the split is Geneva 34.3 per cent, Vaud 30.2, Fribourg 16.1, Neuchâtel 11.6, Valais 6.4 and Jura 1.1 per cent. The same document meets six different sets of expectations: what passes in Geneva fails in Fribourg on the language block alone.
The check is worth running per advert rather than once. Reduce Romandie job titles to their base form and a hundred adverts leave 83.0 distinct titles, against 76.0 in the rest of Switzerland — even fewer pairs of adverts that one document fits equally well. There is usually time for it: the median Romandie advert in our holdings is 26.8 days old, the median advert elsewhere 19.2.
Share of adverts that state a language requirement and name German at professional or native level. Continuing analysis of the adverts open on SwissJobs.app, as of 23 August 2026.
- Place the advert in one of the two markets first. Employers who also advertise elsewhere in Switzerland account for 57.2 per cent of Romandie adverts: 25.1 per cent of their postings are written in English, 69.9 per cent ask for French and 17.4 per cent for German. Employers who advertise nowhere else in the country account for 42.8 per cent — and 47.1 per cent of their postings are in English, 61.2 per cent ask for English, 52.0 per cent for French and only 6.3 per cent for German.
- Copy the title line verbatim, tag included. Across Romandie titles, «(h/f)» appears in 6.1 per cent, «(h/f/d)» in 2.2, «(f/h/d)» in 1.9, «(h/f/x)» in 1.6 and an unbracketed «h/f» in 1.5 per cent. German-style tags such as «(m/w/d)» sit on 5.7 per cent of Romandie titles and on 34.9 per cent everywhere else.
- Read your document once for accents alone. 34.9 per cent of Romandie job titles carry at least one accented character, against 18.3 per cent in the rest of the country. «Ingenieur» for «ingénieur» or «Geneve» for «Genève» is the first visible sign of a translation, and it appears in the line that gets read first.
- Expect inclusive spellings. 6.4 per cent of Romandie titles carry a double form — «·e» in 2.0 per cent, «(e)» in 1.8, «·trice» in 0.3 — against 0.2 per cent in the rest of Switzerland. Reproduce the form the advert uses instead of quietly normalising it.
- Check the language block against the canton, not the region. Of the Romandie adverts stating a requirement, 63.1 per cent ask for French, 44.3 per cent for English, 13.2 per cent for German and 2.2 per cent for Italian. In Fribourg, 19.4 per cent ask for French and German together; in Geneva, 3.0 per cent do.
- State your own activity rate. Only 13.6 per cent of Romandie titles carry a percentage, against 24.3 per cent elsewhere, and a range such as «80–100%» appears in 5.7 against 14.6 per cent. Whatever the advert leaves open, your document has to close, or the reader closes it for you.
- Say where a foreign qualification stands. Among Romandie adverts whose text we hold, 11.6 per cent raise a diploma or a formal qualification, against 5.6 per cent elsewhere. Whether your occupation requires recognition at all is looked up by profession on reconnaissance.swiss, the service the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation points to.
Test one: which of the two Romandie markets is this?
The region carries two job markets stacked on top of each other, and they want opposite documents. One belongs to employers who also advertise east of the language border: 57.2 per cent of Romandie adverts come from them. Those adverts state a language requirement in 78.5 per cent of cases, ask for French in 69.9 per cent and for German in 17.4 per cent, and only a quarter of them are written in English.
The other belongs to employers who advertise nowhere else in Switzerland — 42.8 per cent of adverts. You would expect the local market and you find the international one: 47.1 per cent of those postings are in English, 61.2 per cent ask for English, 52.0 per cent for French and 6.3 per cent for German. The names explain it. International organisations place 2.8 per cent of Romandie adverts against 0.2 per cent in the rest of the country, and the English-language part of this group is CERN, IOM, the ICRC, the World Meteorological Organization and the World Economic Forum alongside Geneva private banks and commodity houses. 55.1 per cent of those adverts sit in the Geneva area.
So the language of your dossier follows the sender, not the workplace. A CV translated into French for «the Romandie» is the wrong document against an English advert from the ICRC, and an English CV is equally wrong against a posting from the Fribourg cantonal administration. The first minute of the check belongs to who is hiring, not to what the text says.
Test two: the title line, character by character
In German-speaking Switzerland the gender tag is a footnote to the job title; in the Romandie it is the identifying mark. 16.0 per cent of titles there carry a form built on h and f, against 1.7 per cent elsewhere, while 34.9 per cent of titles outside the region carry a form built on m, w or d against 5.7 per cent inside it. The spelling varies within the region too: «(h/f)» leads at 6.1 per cent, followed by «(h/f/d)», «(f/h/d)», «(h/f/x)» and the bracketless «h/f».
This is a matching exercise, not a matter of style. If your name sits under «Chargé de communication (h/f)» because that is what the advert is called, the reader meets the exact string she wrote herself. If it sits under «Communications Officer», she meets a translation and has to translate it back before she can compare anything. In a market where a hundred adverts produce 83.0 distinct base titles, that back-translation is not something to count on.
The vocabulary itself is measurable. The commonest French role words in Romandie titles are «chef» at 3.8 per cent of adverts, «assistant» at 3.3, «responsable» at 2.9, «technicien» at 2.6, «conseiller» at 2.5 and «ingénieur» at 2.0. Beside them sits an English stock of comparable size: «manager» at 6.7 per cent, «engineer» at 5.6, «specialist» at 3.5. A French role word appears in 24.2 per cent of Romandie titles and an English one in 30.9 per cent. Both stocks are legitimate; what matters is which one this advert draws from.
Test three: the language block belongs to the canton
«French for the Romandie» is too coarse a rule to check against. Of Geneva adverts that state a requirement, 51.1 per cent ask for French, 62.3 per cent for English and 7.7 per cent for German — and 45.7 per cent never mention French at all. Fribourg counts differently: 73.5 per cent French, 26.5 per cent English, 27.8 per cent German, with 19.4 per cent asking for French and German together. Vaud sits between them at 70.6 per cent French and 12.2 per cent German, Valais at 71.7 and 18.9, Neuchâtel at 58.2 and 6.9.
Level matters as much as language. Where a Romandie advert names French, it asks for professional level in 87.0 per cent of cases, conversational in 6.9 and native in 5.5. The requirement is almost never «basic knowledge». At the same time barely half of Romandie adverts name French at all, so a language block that answers the question unprompted fills a gap in the other half rather than repeating something already settled.
That working in more than one language is normal here is measured federally: the Federal Statistical Office reports that 41 per cent of the employed population in Switzerland use more than one language at work at least once a week. For a CV check that does not mean listing more languages. It means one line per language carrying a level that can be compared with the level the advert asks for, and no line without one.
Test four: the activity rate comes from you
German-language job titles carry the workload with them: 24.3 per cent of titles outside the Romandie name a percentage and 14.6 per cent name a range. Inside the region it is 13.6 and 5.7 per cent. Brackets of any kind are rarer too — 33.6 per cent of Romandie titles use them against 49.3 per cent elsewhere.
Where the advert is silent, a question stays open, and open questions get resolved against the application. A document that names the activity rate you are looking for, and your availability with it, takes that decision off the reader's desk. This matters more here because fixed-term work is more common: 2.2 per cent of Romandie adverts are explicitly temporary and 2.2 per cent run as contracts or mandates, against 0.6 and 0.5 per cent in the rest of Switzerland. Internships are more frequent too, at 1.6 against 0.7 per cent.
Part-time work, by contrast, is advertised less often than in the east: 3.5 per cent of Romandie adverts are recorded as part-time against 6.0 per cent elsewhere. If a reduced rate is what you are after, you will find it named in the advert less often — which is exactly why it has to be named in your document.
Test five: qualifications, recognition, and what the dossier says about it
Diplomas come up more often in Romandie adverts than elsewhere. Among the adverts whose text we hold, a diploma, a degree or a recognised qualification is raised in 11.6 per cent of Romandie texts against 5.6 per cent in the rest of the country. A CV that names the qualification with a year and an institution and stops there has answered only half of that.
On the facts: practising certain professions in Switzerland can require recognition of a foreign qualification, and which body is competent depends on the profession. The State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation directs enquiries to reconnaissance.swiss, where you look up your own occupation and learn whether recognition is required and who grants it. That is a description of the procedure, not a recommendation — the competent body is the one that says what applies in an individual case.
For the document itself the consequence is one line: title, awarding institution, country, year, and after it the state of the recognition where the profession is regulated. «Recognition applied for, procedure under way» is information. A blank in that position is a follow-up question, and follow-up questions cost the first round.
The ten-minute pass
Take a real advert and work top to bottom. First minute: who is hiring, and does this employer advertise elsewhere in Switzerland? Minutes two to four: adopt the title line, with its tag, its accents and its double form. Minutes five to seven: language block against the canton — in Valais and Fribourg German belongs in the check, in Geneva and Neuchâtel almost never. Minutes eight to ten: activity rate, availability, and the state of any recognition procedure.
The effort is worth it because it does not repeat. One document stays the base; per advert you change the top line and the paragraph beneath it. With 83.0 distinct base titles per hundred adverts, that is the only approach that scales without collapsing into a generic document that fits nothing.
Finally, allow for the shape of the employer side: 48.8 per cent of employers with a Romandie advert have exactly one opening. Behind it there is rarely a department that has filled this role twenty times, and usually someone handling the hire alongside their own job. For your document that means the answer to «why does this fit?» has to be on the first page, not something a reader has to reconstruct from the sequence of your positions.
Shares from our continuing analysis of the open Swiss adverts we track, as of 23 August 2026. The Romandie here means adverts whose location names a French-speaking municipality or one of the cantons of Geneva, Vaud, Fribourg, Neuchâtel, Jura and Valais; the assignment is made at municipality level so that the bilingual cantons of Valais, Fribourg and Bern do not land on one side as a block. Shares about language requirements refer to the adverts that state one at all.
Check how your CV fits a job — and the Swiss market
Free checker: languages, work permit, skills and more — scored against a specific posting.
ATS CV checker: against a specific advert, freeSources
Related questions
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%