Should a Swiss cover letter be a PDF attachment or the body of the email?

Attach the letter or put it in the email

The answer is both — but not the same thing twice. The attachment is the document; the email text introduces it. Sending only body text loses the layout and letterhead; attaching only sends an empty message.

A letter has seven formal parts; an email body carries two of them

arbeit.swiss, run by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, sets out what a Swiss cover letter contains as a closed list: your postal address, the company's postal address, the date, a subject heading, an opening salutation, a closing greeting and a signature. That list is the whole argument for the PDF. It describes a letter — a document with a head — and not a message sitting in somebody's inbox.

Paste the text into an email and you keep the salutation and the sign-off. Your address, the employer's address, the date and the signature go. Two of the four have plausible substitutes: the recipient is in the To field, the date is in the mail header. Your own postal address and your signature have none, and in a country where the dossier is a formal object, that is noticed.

The signature is not decoration. The Swiss letter template provides for it explicitly, in the order sign-off, digital signature, first name and surname, even when the letter is never printed. It is the mark that someone closed a document deliberately rather than filled in a box.

There is also what happens to the two versions inside the company. An attachment is a named file that gets saved into a folder and forwarded to the person who will actually decide. An email body is part of a message addressed to a single inbox. Put the letter only in the body and you leave it to chance whether the second reader ever sees it.

The official model message is four lines long

The one publicly prescribed wording in Switzerland sits on berufsberatung.ch, the careers portal the SDBB runs on behalf of the cantons. It is written for school leavers applying for apprenticeships, which is worth knowing, but it is the only official model text there is — and it is startlingly short: a subject line naming the job, a salutation with the person's name, one sentence stating that the application documents are attached and that you look forward to hearing back, then the sign-off and your name.

One sentence. The accompanying instruction is just as brief: if the advert carries no link to an online form it usually carries an email address, in which case you send the application by mail, keep the text short and factual, and attach the complete documents as PDFs.

That brevity is a division of labour, not modesty. The message says what has arrived and which job it is for. The letter says why it should be you. Move the second job into the message and you have not enriched the email — you have relocated the letter to the one place where half its components cannot exist, and turned the attachment into a duplicate.

Two things do belong in the email that are not in the letter: the sender address, which SECO wants to be a serious one ideally containing your first name and surname, and the subject line, which is the only text anyone reads before deciding whether to open the message at all. Both take a minute. Both are where an otherwise careful application trips.

Whether you get to choose at all depends on the language of the advert

Before deciding what to write in the email, it is worth knowing how often there is one. Every active advert on SwissJobs.app carries an application link that points to a web page; not one points at a mailbox. Across the summarised advert texts, an email address for applying shows up in roughly one case in a thousand.

What sits behind the link, though, varies sharply by the language the advert is written in. English-language adverts are the most industrialised: 65.5 per cent end on an established application platform, with Greenhouse, Ashby and Lever together carrying 18.7 per cent of them. If you are job-hunting in English in Switzerland, you are mostly filling in forms designed elsewhere, and the letter is whatever field they label 'cover letter'.

German-language adverts run at 35.4 per cent, Italian-language ones at 49 per cent — three quarters of the Italian-language adverts go through just two hosts, the career portals of one provider and the job site of one staffing agency. French-language adverts are the least standardised of the four: only 26.9 per cent reach a known platform, and 15.4 per cent end on a host that carries at most three adverts in total. Those small company pages are where an email address, and therefore a genuine choice, still turns up.

Taken together, a little over two in five adverts end on a known platform, and the hosts carrying at most three adverts make up more than two thirds of all application destinations while accounting for only 10.8 per cent of adverts. You do not learn one submission process; you meet a new one almost every time. That is the practical case for a single well-made PDF that fits everywhere, rather than a perfectly tuned email that fits one route.

The one case where the text really does go in the box

Some forms have no upload field for the letter at all, only a text area labelled 'motivation' or 'your message'. Then the box is the letter, and you paste the body in: no sender address, no recipient address, no date, because the fields above the box already hold all three. The salutation, the body and the sign-off stay exactly as written.

Check two things afterwards. First the paragraph breaks — many text areas discard blank lines, and a letter delivered as a single slab reads nothing like the one you drafted. Second the special characters: curly quotes and long dashes from a word processor come out as question marks in some fields.

Keep the PDF anyway. You will want it for the interview, for the follow-up two weeks later, and for the next vacancy at the same employer. And if a general 'additional documents' field appears further down the form, that is where it goes.

The opposite mistake is the expensive one: a friendly message with nothing attached. SECO's instruction is to check completeness before sending or uploading, and complete in Switzerland means letter, CV, work references and diplomas. However well written, an email body on its own is not an application.