Getting your motivation letter checked — which tools check it against the advert?

The tools compared directly

As of 4 September 2026. Every figure for another tool comes from that tool's own site; "n/s" means it was not readable there — not that the feature is missing. Our row comes from the code and from walking the live flow.

What it costs

Prices read from the vendors' own pricing pages on 4 September 2026. Jobscan's prices sit behind a login, so no figure is given rather than a stale one.

Same candidate, same advert, three documents

Anonymous runs through the public SwissJobs.app CV check on 4 September 2026, against an open advert for a CNC milling setter at Elos Medtech in Hölstein. Invented candidate, every check run twice; the CV and the tailored letter returned the same overall figure both times. An experiment, not a statistic.

What a check against the advert can actually check

A tool that checks your letter "against the advert" can only be as good as the part of the advert that states requirements at all. On 4 September we opened 318 open English-language Swiss adverts from 235 employers, apprenticeships and internships excluded, and looked for the block a motivation letter is supposed to answer: "Your profile", "What you bring", "Requirements", "Who you are".

English-language Swiss adverts are the longest of the four: 450 words at the median, against 288 for German, 372 for French and 353 for Italian. Their requirements block is correspondingly generous — around 149 words where the German equivalent runs to 71. If you are applying in English in Switzerland, you have roughly twice as much material to hang a letter on as a German-language applicant does.

The catch is that the block is there less often. Only 43.1 per cent of English-language adverts carry an explicit requirements heading, the lowest of the four languages, against 60.8 per cent in German. The rest describe the mission, the team and the company and leave you to work out which capability follows. So the English-language advert is long and loosely structured — the combination a keyword checker handles worst, because there is plenty of text and much of it is about the employer.

The salutation, which half the advice literature is about, usually has no source in the advert either: 3.5 per cent of English-language adverts give a personal e-mail address of the firstname.lastname@ kind. Role mailboxes such as hr@ or careers@ are excluded on purpose — there is no person behind them to address. Writing "Dear Sir or Madam" is therefore not laziness, it is what the advert leaves you.

The experiment: a letter run through a CV checker

Because it is the obvious shortcut — you have a CV checker to hand, so you upload the letter — we did it. An invented candidate, a Swiss-trained Polymechaniker EFZ with six years of CNC milling, against a real open advert from our own index: CNC Einrichter Fräsen at Elos Medtech in Hölstein. Three documents, the same man, the same job, every check run anonymously through the public CV check, every check run twice.

The CV scored 43 out of 100. The generic cover letter, which takes nothing from the advert, scored 17. The letter written against the advert scored 64 — twenty-one points above the same candidate's own CV. The repeats returned 43 and 64, so the gap is signal rather than jitter.

This is not an argument for sending a letter instead of a CV. It shows what the score measures: textual proximity to the advert, and motivation stated out loud. A motivation letter is built for exactly that — it names the role, picks up the requirements in the advert's own nouns and says why. A CV does none of this because it is not supposed to. On the "motivation" dimension the CV scored 12 and the tailored letter 82.

The other direction is the useful one. The generic letter fell to 17, with 18 on keyword match and 10 on hard skills. Forty-seven points separate the letter that read the advert from the letter that did not. The instrument does tell those two apart — it just does not measure what you would want a letter check to measure.

And it notices what it has been given. On the generic letter the report said: "the document submitted is a cover letter only, with no CV attached." It then asked for what a CV should contain — quantified achievements, a USP section, a missing machine control — none of which is useful advice for a letter, and one or two of which would actively make it worse.

SwissJobs.app

What it does: the letter is written from the advert text and your CV, in the language you choose per letter. Afterwards you can change any line by hand or tell the editor what to change — and because the advert text travels with every one of those instructions, "pick up the second requirement from the advert" is something the tool can actually carry out. You choose the advert from our own Swiss stock; you only paste one in when the role comes from elsewhere.

What it does not do: give the letter a grade. The CV check returns a score, the letter editor does not, and we think that is the right way round — the number in the experiment above is the best evidence of how little it means on a letter.

Price: seven trial days with everything unlocked, then CHF 15 monthly or CHF 95 for a whole year. A free account covers five documents a day and ten per rolling week, plus five letters and five AI instructions a day. PDF and Word without a watermark. Four languages, each with its own pages.

The objection: the letter assistant asks for an account on the first screen. The CV check does not — one check per browser runs with no signup. If you only want to see a letter once without registering, RadarJob or cvswiss.ch will serve you better.

cvswiss.ch

The closest Swiss competitor, at the same monthly price. Its ATS check is free and needs no account: upload a PDF or DOCX and the result comes back at once. It takes no advert, though — what it checks is the document's readability and ATS structure, not the fit to a role. You can upload a motivation letter there; it will not tell you anything useful.

The letter does get written: "AI writes a matching cover letter. Swiss format, professional tone." The CHF 15 monthly plan covers unlimited CVs and letters plus an export of the official RAV/ORP job-search form — they have that too, and anyone claiming otherwise has not read their pricing page. A single CV costs CHF 5 one-off, with the explicit note "No edits after download".

Who it is for: anyone who needs one document and does not want a subscription. CHF 5 for a CV is the cheapest serious entry in the Swiss field, and their own pricing page names the benchmark it measures itself against — "A professional CV writer costs CHF 200–500".

Bewerbung.ch

The Swiss application AI is called BeKI and runs on credits: 3 free with the account, 10 credits for CHF 5, 25 for CHF 10, one credit per action. That puts a single AI action at roughly forty to fifty Rappen — the cheapest unit price on this page.

The six actions are listed on the BeKI page: write the application letter, optimise the CV, interview training, short profile, details of work experience, details of education. So the letter is written, while "optimise" is reserved for the CV. Its interview trainer gives feedback on a practice conversation, by text or voice, and explicitly accepts Swiss German — there is nothing comparable for the letter.

Premium costs CHF 20 for one month or CHF 50 for three, in both cases with no automatic renewal, and unlocks the unbranded layouts; the free account gives one template carrying a logo. Data sits on Swiss servers. The interface is German only, which rules the tool out for the Romandie and Ticino.

Who it is for: anyone who wants to see the cost per action and never has to cancel anything. "No automatic renewal" appears on four separate places on their site, and that is a real argument.

RadarJob

The Romandie approach, and functionally the most interesting on this list: the radar watches jobup.ch and jobs.ch, mails you matching adverts with a score out of ten, and attaches a finished motivation letter as a PDF to each one. CHF 39 a month, no commitment.

The three tools in front of it are free and need no signup: tailor the CV to an advert, ATS-test the CV, prepare for an interview. The ATS test has an advert field, explicitly marked optional — "Si tu vises un poste précis, colle l'annonce". What it checks there is the CV. The letter is delivered, not assessed.

Who it is for: job seekers in French-speaking Switzerland who want the searching taken off their hands. French only, PDF only, no Word export.

Jobscan, Teal and Resume Worded

The three best-known international checkers, and all three check the resume. Teal lists more than fifty tools; the checkers among them are the ATS Resume Checker, Resume Job Description Match, Resume Keyword Scanner, Resume Reviewer and Resume Parser. The cover letter gets one entry, the Cover Letter Generator.

Jobscan has "Cover Letter" in its main navigation. The page behind it describes a generator: paste the job description, upload the resume, generate, rewrite if you want another. The scoring products beside it — Resume Score, Match Report, AI Optimize — are all about the resume. Its prices sit behind a login, which is why the table below carries no figure rather than a stale one.

Resume Worded has no cover-letter page; the address returns an error page. Its products are Score My Resume, Targeted Resume and LinkedIn Review. Its home page also carries the sentence that decides the matter for Switzerland: "English resumes in PDF or DOCX only."

Who they are for: applications in the US and the UK, where the resume genuinely does go through a machine first and a cover letter is often not asked for at all. For a Swiss dossier they are the wrong instrument — and not only because of language. A Swiss application carries Arbeitszeugnisse (employer references for every job you have held), a line stating your permit, and language levels given as CEFR grades. None of that exists in these models.

ChatGPT and the spellchecker

A language model checks whatever you paste against whatever you put beside it, which makes it the only tool on this list that will genuinely read your letter against an advert — provided you supply both. The price is that it has no source: it knows neither the Swiss letter convention nor this particular posting until you show it, and it will find something encouraging to say about any draft.

The way to use it is the question that does not ask for a grade: "which requirement in this advert does my letter not address?" That is a list, not a verdict, and you can check it — by looking at the advert.

A spellchecker such as LanguageTool is the last pass and the cheapest win. It checks language, not fit. For a Swiss letter that means "ss" rather than "ß" throughout, and the place name before the date.

The four checks you run yourself

One: does the job title appear in your letter exactly as it is written in the advert? It is the only check a machine also passes reliably, and it is the first one a mail-merge letter fails.

Two: name two requirements from the requirements block and point to where in the letter each is answered — with evidence, not an assertion. Against a block of 71 to 149 words that takes a minute.

Three: delete every sentence that could also stand in an application to a different employer. What is left is the letter. If nothing is left, you have your answer.

Four: compare the workload percentage, the earliest start date and the language requirement in your letter against the advert and against your CV. Contradictions between two documents in the same envelope are the reliable way to damage an application — and no score catches them, because a checker only ever sees one document.

In short: who should use which

Applying to Swiss adverts and want the letter written for the specific role, with a CV and a check against the same posting: SwissJobs.app. Need one document and no subscription: cvswiss.ch at CHF 5. Want to pay per action and never cancel anything: Bewerbung.ch with BeKI credits. Searching in the Romandie and want the searching done for you: RadarJob. Applying in London or New York: Jobscan or Teal.

And if you genuinely only want the letter checked before you send it: there is no tool worth the name. There are the four checks above, a spellchecker, and a second person who reads the letter without knowing the job.