How do I check my cover letter before sending?

Why a fourth read-through finds nothing

By the third draft you no longer read your own letter; you remember it. Your eye slides over the sentence you rewrote twice and stops at the one you liked, which is the opposite of a check. This is why people can spend an evening «checking» a letter and send it with the previous employer's name still in the second paragraph.

A reconciliation pass does not have this problem, because it never reads the letter alone. It holds the letter against a second document and looks for the gap between them. Gaps are visible; absences in a text you wrote are not.

There is a practical argument too. A style pass has no end state — you can move sentences around for a week. A reconciliation pass ends: either the workload is in the letter or it is not. The useful check is therefore the shorter one, which is a rare thing to be able to say.

And it is the part nobody else can do for you. A friend reading your letter will find typos and clumsy phrasing. Whether you named the right vacancy, quoted the right requirement and gave a start date that matches your notice period — only you have the material to check that.

Pass 1: against the advert

Put the advert next to the letter and work down it. The title first: the job title belongs in your subject line word for word as advertised, because in many companies that string is the only thing routing your application to the right file. If the advert carries a reference number or names a specific site, both belong in the subject line too — 22.5 per cent of the adverts we hold have a second advert from the same employer with the same job title, at another location or in another department. Company plus title can both be correct and still point at the wrong process.

Then the languages, which is where English-language applications in Switzerland most often fall short. Among English-language adverts that state their language needs, 30.5 per cent ask for two or more, and 24.7 per cent name German. An advert written in English is not a promise that English is the working language; it is a signal about who the employer hopes to reach. If German or French appears in the requirements, your letter needs one sentence that answers it honestly, with a level and where you use it — including the honest version, that you are at A2 and taking a course.

Then availability. Only 8.3 per cent of English-language adverts state a workload in the title, and 4.4 per cent state a range. In the German-language part of the market the number is much higher, which means the English-language convention leaves the question to you. A letter that never says when you can start and at what percentage leaves the reader with an open question at exactly the moment they are comparing candidates.

Finally the housekeeping details, usually in the last lines of the advert: the documents requested, the contact person, occasionally a closing date. Each is a yes-or-no question, and answering all of them takes less time than rewriting one paragraph.

Pass 2: against your own CV

This pass looks for contradictions between two documents describing the same person. It is the dullest of the three and the one that pays. A contradiction is the only kind of mistake that is actively used against you later, because it turns into the first question in the interview.

Check four things. Years first: «over eight years in logistics» in the letter and a start date six years ago in the CV is not a rounding error to someone who adds up dates for a living. Job titles second: the title you use for your current role in the letter should be the title in the CV and the title on your reference letter.

Language levels third, and this is the common break. Letters say «fluent English, good German»; CVs say «C1, B1». Side by side they read as two opinions on one question. Either use the same scale in both, or drop the self-assessment from the letter and describe the use instead — the language you run meetings in, the language you write reports in.

Availability fourth. Workload and start date in the letter must be consistent with what the CV implies about your current employment and, for applicants from abroad, with what you say about permits. If the CV shows a job you have not resigned from and the letter offers an immediate start, you have created a question you will have to answer before anything else.

One extra look, at no cost: does the letter make a claim the CV cannot support — a project, a team size, a result? That is often the whole point of a cover letter, and it is fine. It should just be a decision rather than an accident.

Pass 3: against the last application you sent

Anyone applying seriously sends several letters a week, all descended from one file. So the third pass is not aimed at your judgement, it is aimed at the document. You check five fields and nothing else: company name, job title, contact person, workload, start date.

The leftover everyone fears is the wrong company name, and it is the least likely to survive, because it appears twice — in the address block and in the salutation — and the eye catches the repetition. The dangerous leftover is the right employer with the wrong vacancy, and the Swiss market makes it likelier than elsewhere: 68.8 per cent of the adverts we hold come from employers with ten or more openings at once, and the median advert comes from an employer with about 25 open. If you apply twice to a large employer, you are almost never applying to the same thing twice.

The mechanics are unglamorous. Open the version you sent last, put it beside the new one, and compare only those five fields. Two minutes, and it replaces proofreading body text you did not change.

If you keep a simple log of what you sent where — the official Swiss guidance for apprenticeship applicants suggests exactly that, and it is just as useful for adults — this pass becomes almost free. It also gives you the answer when someone calls three weeks later about an advert you no longer remember.

What the official list covers, and what it leaves out

arbeit.swiss treats checking as its own step and reduces it to three lines: spelling and formatting errors, completeness of documents, clear and correct file names. Then the form: save and send the documents as PDF files, and apply from a reliable email address that ideally contains your first name and surname.

«Completeness» is more than counting attachments. On the same page, a complete Swiss dossier is the cover letter, the CV, and reference letters, diplomas and certificates — the reference letters gapless and in chronological order with the most recent first, and compiled into one PDF. Checking the letter and not the attachments is checking half the application.

For the letter itself the same source lists the formal elements against which completeness can be measured: sender address, recipient address, date, subject line, salutation, closing formula and signature. That is a pure yes-or-no list and takes half a minute.

What no official list mentions is content. No checkpoint asks whether your letter states which job it concerns, picks up a requirement from the advert, or explains your interest in this employer rather than any employer. That is not an oversight — form can be prescribed, relevance cannot. It is precisely the part the three reconciliation passes cover.

One more official recommendation is easy to miss because it sits in the guidance written for apprenticeship applicants: show the letter to another person before you save it as PDF. It holds for adults unchanged. Someone else reads what is on the page; you read what you meant.

The route the letter takes, and the deadline nobody checks

The last check is about transport rather than text. Roughly a third of the adverts we hold route the application through a recruiting provider's form rather than a company mailbox. That changes three things: the letter becomes an uploaded file, your covering words go into a message box, and formatting only survives inside the PDF.

So open the file you uploaded — actually open it, do not just look at the file name. The usual failures are mechanical: the same attachment twice, a document saved with tracked changes still in it, a two-page PDF whose second page holds nothing but the sign-off.

The file name is the only part of your application that stays visible after the email or the form field is gone. The official wording is «clear and correct file names», and clear means the name alone says who wrote it and what it is for.

Then the deadline nobody thinks about, because it is not written anywhere. English-language adverts in our count are the oldest in the market: median age 43 days, and 58.9 per cent open for 30 days or more, against 36.7 per cent for German-language adverts. Before you send a letter you spent two evenings on, click the advert once. Is it still there? Has the workload changed? Has a contact person appeared? It is the cheapest check available and the only one that can save you the work entirely.

Checks that are not worth your evening

The fourth style pass. Past the third draft the yield goes to zero, and what usually happens is that concrete sentences get traded for smoother ones. Smooth is the direction a cover letter should not travel in.

The opinion poll. Three readers produce three incompatible rebuilds and a letter with no position left in it. One reader is the official advice and the right number. Give that person a question rather than a task: is it clear which job this is about, and what claim stays with you afterwards?

The hunt for the perfect length. One page is the Swiss convention, and that is the whole of the length question. A letter that fits neatly on one page and never refers to the advert fails all three passes above.

And waiting for a better moment. Between «finished» and «sent» many applicants leave several days, while the advert keeps running and other dossiers arrive. Once the three passes and the official three-item list are done, the letter is finished. The better moment does not arrive.