How do I check my CV for gaps?
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In short
Turn the CV into a list of numbers and subtract. Write every entry — jobs and education alike — as month and year, sort the whole thing chronologically, then subtract each start from the end before it. A difference of one means seamless; anything larger is empty time; anything smaller is an overlap. Then hold that list against your Swiss reference letters, which state the duration of each job by law, and check last whether the top line still reaches the current month.
Reading cannot do this job, and not because you are careless. Reading supplies continuity: two entries stacked on top of each other look uninterrupted the moment their years touch, and you read your own document knowing how the story continued. The person screening it knows none of that. They see two dates and take the difference — which is exactly the calculation you can run first.
There is a second reason the reading version fails. Two of the distortions are structural rather than accidental. Year-only dates leave an interval anywhere between zero and 22 months wide, and the open end at the top of the page keeps growing while you apply. A gap check that leaves those two alone has audited the past and missed the part that actually gets asked about.
Share of the vacancies open on SwissJobs.app by age of the advert, 23 August 2026. Median 20 days.
- Do it on a blank sheet, away from the CV file. Two numbers per entry, start and end, in month-and-year form. If you want the differences in your head, convert each date to a single number — year times twelve plus month — and subtract. The point of the exercise is to look at the document once without its sentences.
- Put education into the same list as employment. Most self-checks fail here: the work history gets checked carefully while the diploma sits in its own block further down. The interval between finishing an apprenticeship and starting the first job, or between dropping one course and beginning another, is where the unexamined months live.
- Flag the negative differences too. Overlapping entries are not gaps, but they belong to the same category — a claim the enclosed documents will either confirm or contradict. Two part-time jobs held at once is the usual harmless explanation, and it only reads as harmless when the workload percentage sits next to each one.
- Resolve every line that carries years but no months. 2019 to 2021 can mean December 2019 to January 2021 or January 2019 to December 2021, and the two readings are 22 months apart. Two such lines in a row turn an undefined duration into an undefined interval between them.
- Go to the source when a date is genuinely uncertain. Under Art. 330a of the Code of Obligations an employee may request a reference at any time, and on express request it is limited to the nature and duration of the employment. That is precisely the short document that settles a date line years after you left.
- Check the month boundaries before you decide you have a gap. Notice periods under Art. 335c run to the end of a calendar month, so a one- or two-month interval between two jobs is often produced by the timetable rather than by time off.
- Date the open end and diarise the next check. "Since 2024", with no month and nothing dated in the present near the top of page one, is the one gap in the document that grows on its own — by another month for every month you spend applying.
The check is a subtraction, not a read-through
The whole procedure is two columns. On the left, each entry with a start and an end as month and year. On the right, the difference to the next start. A difference of one is seamless: one job ends in November, the next begins in December. A difference of three leaves two empty months. The output is a number rather than an impression, and that is the entire difference from reading the page again.
A worked example with three entries: 06.2015 to 11.2018, then 12.2018 to 03.2021, then 10.2021 to 05.2026. The first difference is one, so nothing happened there. The second is seven — six empty months. The third, from the last end to the current month, is three: two empty months, and one more with every month that passes. None of the three was visible while reading, because the years touch and the sentence beside them is about responsibilities and projects.
Sorting the differences is the real work, and there are only three bins. Intervals the contractual calendar produced by itself; intervals your own paperwork already explains, because a course, an assignment or a period of service sits inside them; and intervals for which no document exists yet. Only the third bin is a gap in the sense the question means.
The second timeline nobody checks
A Swiss CV keeps experience and education in separate blocks, and self-checks obediently follow that split. It is the most expensive habit in the whole exercise, because time only runs once. Apprenticeship, studies, internships, service and jobs have to sit in one list before the subtraction can tell you what really lay between graduation and the first payslip.
The same applies to entries that summarise several stints in one line. "2021 to 2022, various temporary assignments" is quick to write and hides every interval inside it, which then has to be reconstructed under pressure in an interview. For your own check, list the assignments separately even if they collapse back into a single line afterwards.
At the top of the list sit the overlaps. Two jobs that overlap by months are unremarkable as long as the workload percentages are shown and the reference letters agree. Without a percentage, the same overlap reads as a contradiction — and in a first screen a contradiction costs more than a cleanly dated empty month.
What year-only dates hide, including from you
A line carrying bare years is not a date, it is a range. 2019 to 2021 might be December 2019 to January 2021, or January 2019 to December 2021. Between the shortest and the longest reading lie 22 months, and the reader gets to choose which one to assume.
For gap-checking the effect is larger than it is for the length of any single job. If one entry ends with 2020 and the next begins with 2021, the space between them is anywhere from zero to 22 empty months. You cannot check that interval while the months are missing, and the person screening you cannot rule it out either.
So months are not a formality; they are the precondition for the check producing a result at all. Add them and the real intervals appear in the same minute — often fewer than memory claims. What has settled in your head as "roughly a year out of work" frequently turns out to be five or six months once it is written as arithmetic.
What you check against: documents, not recollection
Your date column does not stand alone. Behind it are the reference letters you enclose, and Swiss law prescribes what they contain. Art. 330a para. 1 of the Code of Obligations: the employee "may at any time request from the employer a reference concerning the nature and the duration of the employment relationship, the quality of his work and his conduct". The duration is always in there.
The useful words for a gap check are "at any time". If the paperwork for an old job is missing, the entitlement is not framed as something that expires with the job, and paragraph 2 adds that on the employee's express request the reference is limited to the nature and duration of the employment relationship. That short form is enough to settle a date you no longer remember exactly.
In practice: the CV is the claim, the enclosures are the evidence, and the check consists of putting them side by side. Where a letter and a line disagree, the line gets corrected rather than the letter. Where a letter is missing altogether, note which line currently has nothing behind it — before somebody else notices.
The intervals the notice-period calendar creates by itself
Some of the differences you find are not a CV problem at all but contract law. Art. 335c para. 1 of the Code of Obligations: employment may be terminated "at one month's notice during the first year of service, at two months' notice in the second to ninth years of service and at three months' notice thereafter, all such notice to expire at the end of a calendar month".
Two consequences for the list. First, jobs end on month boundaries, so differences of one or two months routinely come out of the calendar rather than out of a career break. Second, the period depends on length of service: ten years with the same employer means three months of notice, and the next employer waits that long before anyone starts.
Paragraph 2 allows those periods to be varied by written individual, standard or collective employment contract, and they may drop below one month only by collective agreement and only in the first year of service. For the checklist that means comparing each short interval with the contract you held at the time before filing it under "needs explaining".
The gap at the open end grows while you search
The last difference in the list is the only one that changes without you touching it: the distance between the end of your most recent entry and the current month. It grows at the speed of the hiring process, and that speed can be measured. Of the vacancies open on SwissJobs.app today, half have been advertised for about three weeks — the median is 20 days.
The rest of the distribution is the real message: 47.5 per cent of open adverts are between eight and 30 days old, 10.9 per cent between 31 and 60 days, 11.6 per cent between 61 and 90 days, and 16.4 per cent have been open for more than 90 days. Nearly four in ten have been running over a month — and the notice period of whoever accepts comes on top of that.
Add it up and the conclusion is uncomfortable but useful: months usually pass between an advert appearing and somebody actually starting. The gap you are checking today is therefore not the gap that gets discussed in the interview. Practically, that means dating the open end to the month, keeping one line dated in the present near the top of the page, and repeating the arithmetic monthly — the second run takes minutes.
Market figures come from the ongoing analysis of the vacancies open on SwissJobs.app, 23 August 2026. The age of an advert is the difference between its publication date and that reference day; the distribution is measured on the open vacancies that carry a publication date, which is 99.7 per cent of the stock.
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- Code of Obligations Art. 330a — the reference covers the nature and duration of the employment relationship and may be requested at any time; on express request limited to nature and duration (English translation, not legally binding)
- Code of Obligations Art. 335c — notice periods of one, two or three months depending on years of service, expiring at the end of a calendar month; variation only under para. 2 (English translation, not legally binding)
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Computed live from our own index, not quoted from a study. Shares only, as of today.
Language the advert is written in
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