CV check: SwissJobs.app or the cvswiss.ch ATS check — which checks more?

Feature comparison

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

Pricing side by side

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

What the two checks actually returned on 4 September 2026

We built an invented CV: Alessia Frei, marketing manager, eight years in Swiss B2B, three roles, duties rather than results, languages given as "native / good / school level", no photo, no figures anywhere. Deliberately average, because a perfect CV tells you nothing about a checker.

cvswiss.ch: file uploaded, no account, and after roughly fifteen seconds the page showed "74". Below it a paragraph, five strengths, five improvements. The criticism was accurate and Swiss-specific: no photo indicated, language proficiency not expressed as CEFR levels, bullet points task-focused with no quantified achievements, IT skills missing the tools a marketing role expects. For a quick second opinion on an existing PDF, you get it with no friction at all.

SwissJobs.app, same text, no advert: 38 per cent. Seven separate scores show where that comes from — achievements 15, differentiator 20, motivation 18, against fit 62 and soft skills 55. The Swiss gate graded the permit line as present, languages as partial and the photo as missing. The same findings, taken apart and graded one by one.

SwissJobs.app, same text, against a real advert from our index — a performance and digital marketing role at a 60 per cent Pensum near Zurich: 16 per cent. The term table names what is missing and how often the advert says it: Meta Ads three times, Google Ads three times, funnels and landing pages three times, GA4 twice, ROAS twice, e-commerce twice. Three terms matched. That is not a harsher grade for the same CV; it is the answer to a different question.

Why a check without the advert cannot see the decisive part

We counted, in our own index, how much two adverts for the same job actually share. Only distinctive terms were compared — words that appear in fewer than two per cent of all adverts, so not "team" and not "motivated" — and only across different employers, so that one company posting the same role repeatedly could not flatter the result.

Two adverts for the same job at two different employers share a median of 9.5 per cent of those terms. 75.8 per cent of the terms in one advert are asked for by no other employer advertising that same job. A single advert names only about 8.8 per cent of everything the occupation asks for across all its postings. For English-language adverts the overlap is 13.5 per cent, slightly higher than the market as a whole.

The practical consequence is narrow and real: about three quarters of what a given advert asks for appears in no other advert for that job. A checker that never sees the advert cannot grade that part — not through carelessness, but because the information was never given to it. It examines the packaging closely and the contents against an average that no employer actually posts.

The reverse holds too. If you have no advert yet and are simply getting your dossier into shape, you do not need that comparison — and a fast conventions check is the better tool for the job. cvswiss.ch gives you one with no account and no wait.

Where cvswiss.ch is plainly better

Friction. Choose a file and you are done — no signup, no intermediate step, an answer in about fifteen seconds. Ours takes just under a minute because three analyses run and are then merged. For a quick look at an existing PDF, faster is better.

Price for exactly one application. If you want a clean file after the check, theirs costs CHF 5 once — their pricing card says "1 professional PDF download" and "No edits after download". We have no single purchase: after the free account there is the 7-day trial, then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year. For a single application their model is cheaper, and no arithmetic changes that.

And one point that concerns us directly: their check takes a file and reads embedded images from it. Our Swiss gate judges the photo reliably only when you upload the file — in one of our two runs, with the CV pasted as text, it assumed a photo that was not there. If you want the photo criterion genuinely checked, upload the document rather than pasting it.

How seriously to take an ATS score — especially if you are applying in English

On its result screen on 4 September 2026, cvswiss.ch displayed the sentence "Most Swiss recruiters auto-reject under 80%", alongside an offer to rewrite the CV to "90%+" from CHF 5. While the analysis ran, the same page showed "In Switzerland, 75% of CVs are filtered by ATS before reaching human eyes." Neither sentence carried a source on the page.

We can neither confirm nor refute those numbers — nobody sees inside another employer's filter. What we can count is where an advert sends the application. Of the open postings in our index, 63.6 per cent point at the employer's own site, 31.1 per cent at an applicant tracking system and 5.3 per cent at a job board. Apprenticeships are excluded, and an employer site can of course run a system behind its own form that we cannot see from outside.

The split by advert language is the part worth knowing if you are reading this in English: German-language adverts route into an applicant system 24.1 per cent of the time, English-language adverts 54.9 per cent — more than double. English-language postings in Switzerland come disproportionately from large international employers, and those are the ones running Workday, SmartRecruiters and Greenhouse. So the machine matters more for the English-language job market here than for the German-language one, and the reader most likely to be told "ATS advice is overblown in Switzerland" is the reader for whom it is least true.

Even so, no score predicts an outcome — ours included. What a check can honestly claim is a mechanism: a CV using the advert's own vocabulary matches keyword-based filters better than a generic one. The second reason for caution is in our own figures: the same CV scored 74 from them and 38 from us, both times without an advert. Two scales, two opinions. The useful part of any report is the list, not the number above it.

What our check costs, and where it stops

Since 4 September 2026 the first check per browser runs without an account; we ran it that day on the live site while signed out and read the report anonymously. The second check asks for a free account — email, no card. Some of our own landing pages still advertise a "5-second account" before the first check; the tool itself now asks afterwards.

Inside the free account the standalone check is not metered. What is metered are documents: 5 a day and 10 per rolling week, the same for motivation letters and AI edit prompts. Then a 7-day trial, then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, cancel any time. The score shown inside the CV editor draws on that same daily budget as an AI edit.

What our check is not: a guarantee. We cannot see inside any employer's filter and never claim a filter is "passed". It is also slower than the tool it is compared with here — if all you want to know is whether your PDF is broadly clean, you wait a minute for something available elsewhere in fifteen seconds.

Which one to use

Use cvswiss.ch if you have no particular advert in front of you, want to know within a minute whether your existing PDF is formally sound, and would rather not create an account anywhere. It is also the right answer for a single application that needs a clean file at the end: CHF 5 paid once beats any subscription, ours included.

Use SwissJobs.app when there is a specific Swiss advert on the table and the question is what to change in this CV for that job. You get the missing terms with their frequency in the posting, seven separate scores instead of one aggregate, and — as the next step — a CV written against that advert, taken from a posting already in our search rather than one you have to find and paste first.

If you are relocating or applying from abroad, the honest ordering is: first make the document a Swiss dossier at all — permit line, CEFR levels, photo, Arbeitszeugnisse — because both tools will otherwise spend their findings on that. Then, and only then, is the per-advert comparison the thing that moves an application forward.