Write me a cover letter for this job
Updated:
In short
That sentence on its own is not enough: «this job» points at something the model cannot see. Paste four things instead — the full advert text, your CV, your target workload and earliest start date, and the salutation the advert allows. Then forbid it to add anything that appears in neither text. Our count of the live adverts shows how much rides on that: two adverts carrying an identical job title share on average 60.4 per cent of their content words, two adverts picked at random only 7.9 per cent.
Without the advert, a model writes inside that narrow shared remainder — courtesy formulas, the occupation name, a handful of generic activity words. The result is grammatically clean and fits every advert in the occupation, which is precisely why it answers none of them.
The division of labour that works is the other way round: the model writes the sentences, you supply the material and do the final check. Two requirements taken from the advert, two entries from your CV that evidence them, and everything the model claims beyond that gets deleted.
Mean share of shared content words between two live adverts carrying exactly the same job title, by occupational field. For comparison, two unrelated adverts share 7.9 per cent. Rolling analysis of SwissJobs.app, August 2026.
- In a chat window «this job» is not a reference: paste the advert in full, not the link and not just the title.
- 73.5 per cent of adverts carry a job title no second advert carries — the occupation name alone gives you nothing to connect to.
- Write the model an explicit list of prohibitions: no praise for the employer, no figures and no attributes that your CV does not evidence.
- The letter goes out in the language of the advert, whatever language you prompted in — a German advert gets a German letter even at an international employer.
- 22 per cent of advert titles state a workload in per cent and 29 per cent carry an (m/w/d) marker: copy the job title and the workload, drop the marker.
Why «this job» points at nothing
A language model cannot see your screen. When you write «this job», it knows neither the employer nor the tasks nor the requirements — only what job adverts contain in general. So it writes the average advert's letter, and the average is further from any single vacancy than most people assume.
That distance is measurable in our own index. We compared every pair of live adverts that carry exactly the same job title and counted how many content words the two actually share: 60.4 per cent on average. Two adverts drawn at random share 7.9 per cent. The second figure is roughly the surface a letter written without the advert can hit.
The first figure is also the exception rather than the rule. 73.5 per cent of adverts carry a job title that no other advert in the index carries, so in most cases there is no comparable second vacancy from which a pattern could be inferred at all.
And the field matters enormously. In retail, two adverts with the same title overlap by 72.7 per cent: the occupation name really does describe the work. In IT and engineering the figure is 36.6 per cent. Two adverts both headed «IT System Engineer» spend roughly two thirds of their text describing different work. In one live title group we counted, the same wording was advertised through the same recruitment firm for a psychiatric clinic in the Bern region, for a packaging manufacturer in Aargau, and for an employer whose sector the advert never names at all. If you work in a technical field, a letter that knows only the title is close to worthless.
The four inputs the prompt needs
First, the advert text, complete and as text. Not the link: many chat windows do not open addresses at all, and where they do, the substance often sits one click further into an application page. Select the whole advert in your browser — title, tasks, requirements, the lines about the company, the contact details — and paste it in.
Second, your CV, also as text and not abridged. The model needs the positions with years, the qualifications in their Swiss form — EFZ, HF, FH, eidg. Fachausweis — and your language levels. Strip that material out and the model substitutes adjectives for evidence, which is exactly what an experienced reader recognises as a form letter.
Third, the three facts the advert almost never supplies and the letter should still state: your workload, your earliest start date and, if you are applying from abroad, your permit situation. Only 22 per cent of advert titles name a workload at all. Whether the employer means 80 or 100 per cent is settled by your application or by a phone call — and one sentence in the letter saves that call.
Fourth, the salutation and where you found the advert. If the advert names a contact person, that name belongs in the salutation; if it does not, «Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren» or «Dear Sir or Madam» is correct and not a failure. Naming the source in the opening line is standard Swiss practice and is the one line in the whole letter no model can guess.
A prompt you can copy
A workable prompt is a role, two pasted texts and a list of prohibitions. The prohibitions are the part most people leave out, and they make the largest difference to the draft you get back.
«You are writing a cover letter for an application in Switzerland. Below are two texts: the job advert and my CV. Follow these rules: 300 words maximum, formal register, no bullet points. First paragraph: the exact job title from the advert and where I found it. Second and third paragraphs: exactly two requirements from the advert, each tied to one position from my CV, with situation, action and result. Fourth paragraph: my workload, my earliest start date, one sentence offering an interview. Use no adjectives about the employer, no figure that is not in my CV, and no attribute without evidence. Where a fact is missing, write [MISSING] instead of an assumption.»
The last rule is the one that changes the output. A model would rather fill a gap than show it; the placeholder instruction reverses that preference. Whatever comes back marked [MISSING] is your to-do list — the contact name you still have to look up, the result you only half remember, the start date you have not decided.
Then a second prompt, which usually improves the letter more than any rewrite: «Delete every sentence in this draft that would apply equally to another job in the same occupation.» What survives is normally two or three sentences. Those are your application. The rest is scaffolding you can write yourself in ten minutes.
What a Swiss letter needs that no chat window supplies
arbeit.swiss, the platform run by SECO and the cantonal employment offices, calls the cover letter «your personal business card» and lists what it has to carry: «your postal address, the company's postal address, date, subject heading, opening salutation, closing greeting and signature». A chat window gives you the salutation and the closing greeting. The rest you assemble in your word processor, which is an argument for building one template and refilling only the address, date and subject line.
The subject line repeats the job title exactly as the advert writes it, plus the workload if one is given. Leave out the gender marker: 29 per cent of advert titles carry an (m/w/d) or (w/m/d), which is the employer addressing all readers, not part of the name of the position you are applying for.
The cantonal career guidance service states the dossier rule in one sentence — «Erstellen Sie für jede Bewerbung ein eigenes Dossier», build a separate dossier for every application — and advises uploading the documents in the right order and, where possible, as a single PDF. arbeit.swiss puts it more briefly: «Save and send your application documents as PDF files.»
One decision the model will only take if you hand it over: the language. If you are applying from abroad, this is the point where applications most often go wrong. The letter follows the language of the advert. A German-language advert gets a German letter even if the company is international and the interview will be in English, and a letter machine-translated from English into German is recognisable in the first two sentences.
The two-column check on the draft
Put the advert and your draft side by side and go through it sentence by sentence. Every substantive sentence has to point at a line in the advert or at an entry in your CV. Sentences that point at nothing come out — not because they are untrue, but because they occupy space that evidence needs.
Three kinds fail this check reliably. Praise for the employer that has no basis in the advert. The plausible-sounding figure you could not reconstruct if asked about it in the interview. And the attribute with no scene behind it: resilient, communicative, solution-oriented.
Then read the letter aloud. A text pitched noticeably above your everyday English or German sets up an expectation the interview will disappoint. That is the most expensive effect of an unedited draft, and it costs more than any stylistic slip.
Length then takes care of itself: one page, roughly 250 to 350 words, four paragraphs. If your draft is longer, it is not short of content — it is short of a deletion pass.
When all you get is one form field
About two thirds of adverts lead to a page run by the employer itself; the rest lead into one of the well-known application portals. What waits for you there varies: an attachment field, an unformatted text box, or nothing but an email address.
So keep two versions. The PDF, with address block, date and signature, for the attachment and for the combined dossier. And a plain-text version, without typographic quotation marks, tabs or special characters, that you can paste into a form field without the line breaks collapsing.
If the application goes by email, the letter belongs in the attachment as a PDF, not in the body. The body carries three lines: what you are applying for, that the letter, CV and references are attached, and a greeting. The email subject line is the letter's subject line.
One last step that has nothing to do with writing and pays for itself anyway: save the advert text before you send. Adverts disappear the moment the position is filled, and two weeks later the text your letter was built from is the best interview preparation you have.
Advert figures come from the rolling analysis of live adverts on SwissJobs.app, as at 22 August 2026. For the comparison of two adverts with an identical job title we counted content words of four characters or more, excluded common function words, and averaged across all pairs within a title group; the reference value for two unrelated adverts comes from a random sample. Occupational fields were assigned from keywords in the job title, and fields with too few pairs are not shown.
Sources
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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%