Photo, permit, language levels: which CV check knows the Swiss criteria?

Which CV check grades which Swiss criterion

As of 4 September 2026. Every cell was read that day from the provider’s own public pages. "Not stated" means it could not be found on the page — not that it is absent from the product.

Feature comparison in detail

Jobscan and cvswiss cells from their own pages, read on 4 September 2026; our own column from the running product the same day.

What the check costs

Every amount read on the provider’s own page on 4 September 2026. Foreign currencies stay in the currency the provider bills in.

Why a keyword comparison cannot see these three at all

Jobscan, Resume Worded, Enhancv and Kickresume all work on the same principle: you upload the CV, paste the advert, and the tool computes how far the two overlap. Within that logic the result is honest. But the logic also decides what can be checked in the first place — only what the employer happened to write down.

That is exactly where a Swiss application breaks the model. In our draw, 4.0 per cent of adverts name a permit or an eligibility requirement and 1.0 per cent mention a photo. A comparison against that text therefore cannot notice, in 96 cases out of 100, that the permit line is missing from your CV. Nothing in the advert is missing.

The language level is the sharpest case, because there the gap runs between what employers expect and what they write. More than half the adverts name a language, but only 13.7 per cent of those adverts print a level. The employer still expects to see one in your CV. The scale has to come from the convention, not from the posting.

What the Confederation says — and what it leaves out

arbeit.swiss, run by SECO, is the official reference for a Swiss dossier, and it exists in all four national languages plus English. Its CV list is short: the title, personal details, previous jobs, schooling and further training, language skills, special skills, interests, references — with a limit of three pages and everything in one PDF.

Two things in that list matter here. First, the photo is in it — the English edition writes "personal details, including photograph" — and language skills form a block of their own, so a tool that treats both as clutter is not disagreeing with a fashion but with the federal recommendation. Second, the editions are not word for word identical: the German one softens the same line to "if applicable", which is worth knowing when two pieces of advice collide.

And what is absent matters more. We fetched all four versions and searched them: no permit word in any of them — no Bewilligung, permis, permesso or permit — and no A1 to C2 anywhere. The criterion that most often decides whether an application can proceed at all appears neither in the advert nor in the official checklist. If you do not already know the permit line belongs in a Swiss CV, neither source will tell you, and no international checker will either.

Jobscan: thorough, but the yardstick is the advert

Jobscan sets out on its own home page what the match rate rests on — five priorities, in this order: hard skills; education level, and explicitly only when the advert names an advanced degree; job title; soft skills; other keywords. Immediately beneath, it states that resume word count and measurable results are not factored in. Its recommended target is a 75 per cent match rate.

That transparency is a mark of quality, and the keyword analysis itself is the most thorough in this field. For an application in the United States or the United Kingdom, Jobscan is the better tool than ours, and anyone grinding through many similar postings will get more out of its keyword work.

For a Swiss dossier, half the yardstick is missing. Because education counts only when an advanced degree is named, the EFZ — the Swiss federal vocational certificate, and the most common qualification in the country — falls outside the one criterion that looked like it was covered. Photo, permit and language level appear in none of the five priorities, and the interface exists in English only.

Resume Worded, Enhancv, Kickresume: what their own pages say

Resume Worded promises "30+ recruiter checks" and a score out of 100, noting that above 90 interviews multiply. Above its own upload box it also prints the limit: "English resumes in PDF or DOCX only. Max 2MB file size." For a German, French or Italian dossier the tool is not weak, it is simply out of scope. Its pricing page answered with a 404 on 4 September 2026.

Enhancv is the most transparent of the four international tools because it lists its 27 checks individually: file format and size, ATS-friendly design, professional e-mail address, header links, file name, date consistency, essential sections, contact information, section order, parse rate, quantified impact, repetition, spelling, bullet length, the two skills matches, action verbs and a tailored job title, then credibility and interview-risk signals, a comparison with peers, a LinkedIn match, age signals, gaps in employment, and three checks on seniority. You can read the whole list without meeting a Swiss criterion — and one category, "Bias & discrimination", exists to flag the kind of personal detail a Swiss dossier conventionally carries.

Kickresume advertises "more than 20 different checks", the most compact audit here. The number is not the interesting part; the design advice on the same page is: "drop photos, background patterns, graphic skill bars, and two-column layouts". For the American market that sentence is written for, it is correct. Followed in Switzerland, it removes an element the federal application guidance lists.

cvswiss.ch: knows the criteria, does not check them automatically

cvswiss.ch is the one direct Swiss competitor here, and the distinction is finer than a yes-or-no table suggests. In its written content it knows all three criteria precisely: the home page offers a "Swiss CV Checklist — 23 Points" advertised as covering "Format, photo, and personal info requirements" and "Language levels, work permit, and Swiss-specific fields", and it runs guides on work permits in a Swiss CV and on the frontalier case.

The automated free check is a different thing. Its own description is an instant, AI-powered analysis of the CV’s readability and ATS compatibility, no signup required, PDF or DOCX. There is no field for an advert, and the three Swiss criteria are not presented as graded categories.

For one kind of reader cvswiss is still the faster answer: if you want a readability number in half a minute without leaving an e-mail address, it is the shortest route there is. If you want to know whether your dossier fits a particular advert, it cannot tell you, because the advert never enters the tool.

What our check actually does with the three criteria

The report carries ten Swiss-specific categories — work-permit fit, language skills, achievements, USP, soft skills, hard skills, education, job history, portfolio and profile photo — alongside a format audit of nine fixed elements for machine readability. The three criteria in this question form their own block: permit and eligibility, languages with their level, profile photo, each graded have, medium or missing, each with a concrete fix when it is not "have".

For the permit, the built-in rule is to state the situation up front with the type — B, C, L or EU/EFTA — and whether sponsorship would be needed. What is graded is the clarity of your statement, not your entitlement: whether you can obtain a permit is decided by the cantonal migration authority, not by any checking tool.

For languages, the check asks for every language with a level, A1 to C2 or native. That is the draw translated into a rule: because four in ten adverts that name a language print no level, the scale has to come from the CV. "Good French" is a self-assessment; "French B2" is a statement a recruiter can hold against the role.

For the photo, the rule is written explicitly against the Anglo-Saxon default: a professional headshot is conventional and positive in Switzerland, and it is never marked down merely because the extracted text does not mention it. Presence is inferred from image data on the first page of the PDF, because what gets analysed is extracted text and a photo is not visible in text.

What our check cannot do

Nobody sees inside an employer’s filter, including us. No tool can promise that a CV "passes the ATS" — the honest claim is a mechanism, not an outcome: a dossier carrying the advert’s own vocabulary and the details Swiss convention expects matches a search built on those words better than a generic one does.

The check also reads text rather than looking at your layout as an image. A photo is inferred from the image data on the first page; upload a CV that is a scan with no text layer and you get less back. And the permit grade only says whether your statement is clear — it is no substitute for information from the cantonal migration authority.

The same limit applies to the RAV form: we fill the SECO sheet from your tracked applications, but the efforts themselves still have to be recorded through the RAV to count. The tool is a convenience layer, never a replacement.

If you are applying from abroad

English-language adverts in Switzerland are the least explicit about language levels of all: among those that name a language, 62.9 per cent attach no level, against 30.4 per cent in German-language adverts. If you are reading the advert in English because the employer is international, you are reading the version least likely to tell you what B2 or C1 means for that role — and most likely to expect it in your CV anyway.

Eligibility is the second thing that changes when you apply from outside. Only 5.8 per cent of English-language adverts mention a permit or a right to work, yet the question sits behind every screening decision. Writing the line yourself — the permit you hold, or that you are an EU/EFTA national and need none, or that sponsorship would be required — removes an unknown that no keyword tool will ever raise for you.

And the third is the dossier itself. A Swiss application is not a resume: it expects Arbeitszeugnisse, the employer references your previous employers write for you, running two to three pages with a photo. The international tools in this comparison are all built around the one-page resume; that is not a flaw in them, it is a different market.

Which tool for which reader

For applications to Swiss adverts, where permit, language level and photo carry weight, our check is the more complete answer — the only one here that grades all three and brings the advert with it. For applications in the United States or the United Kingdom, Jobscan is the better choice, with deeper keyword analysis and a free tier of five scans a month.

If you want a readability number in thirty seconds without handing over an e-mail address, use the free check at cvswiss.ch. If you are checking an English CV for an international employer and value a fully published list of checks, Enhancv is a good fit. Kickresume is honest about what it is: an ATS simulator with Anglo-Saxon design rules.

And the free option that never appears in a tool comparison: an adviser at your regional employment centre knows all three criteria, costs nothing, and reads your dossier as a person. It is slower than an upload, and it is the only entry on this list that also knows the practice in your canton.