The hidden phrases in a Swiss reference letter

The satisfaction formula and how it is read

NOTE: this is convention, not law. The Code of Obligations requires a truthful and benevolent reference (art. 330a) but nowhere defines these formulas. A missing intensifier can be deliberate — or simply a small firm's house wording. Read the ladder as an indication, not a verdict.

The test the court actually applies

In 2005 the Federal Supreme Court decided a dispute about whether a field-sales employee was entitled to be described in his reference as a member of management. Its reasoning is the clearest statement of the standard: what counts is not how the parties labelled the job in the contract, but how an uninvolved third party may understand the reference in good faith, and that understanding must correspond to the facts. Since the man had no management function, he had no claim to the label, whatever his contract said (judgment 4C.60/2005).

The court added something that decides the whole decoding question. How a third party is to understand a reference in good faith is a question of federal law. It is therefore not settled by custom among HR professionals, and certainly not by a list circulating online. It is settled by the objectified understanding of an outsider — and, in the last instance, by a court.

That inverts the usual reading. A decoder list asks what the employer secretly meant. The law asks what this document tells a reader who knows neither the company nor the person, and whether that is accurate. Wording that conveys nothing false to such a reader is not defective merely because someone with a list reads it differently.

Why the leading rulings are hard to read from outside — and what to do about it

A practical warning before the substance. The two leading Federal Supreme Court decisions on the Arbeitszeugnis, BGE 129 III 177 and BGE 136 III 510, are published with an official headnote in German, French and Italian — but the reasoning itself appears only in the language of the proceedings, which in both cases is German. Requesting the French or Italian version returns the translated headnote above an untranslated German text. Both were checked in all three language versions on 31 August 2026.

There is no English version at all. Fedlex does publish an English translation of the Code of Obligations, and it renders Art. 330a para. 1 as the employee's right to «request from the employer a reference concerning the nature and the duration of the employment relationship, the quality of his work and his conduct» — but that translation carries no legal force, and no case law behind it is available in English.

The consequence for an English-speaking reader is concrete rather than abstract: every confident English-language guide to «Swiss reference codes» is written at two removes from the sources, and none of them can quote a Swiss judgment. That is a reason to work from the article and the headnotes, both of which are short, rather than from secondary summaries.

The satisfaction sentence, and the one case that turns on it

Every decoder list is built on a ladder of satisfaction: satisfactory, full satisfaction, complete satisfaction. It is also the only rung of the ladder with real case law attached, and the case does not support the reading the lists give it.

In 8C_553/2022 a laboratory technician litigated over precisely this sentence. The cantonal court ordered the employer to include an overall assessment and drafted it itself: she had performed the tasks assigned to her «to our satisfaction». The employer could not be compelled to write «to our full satisfaction», because the dismissal had been lawful and based partly on performance shortcomings, which the overall assessment had to reflect — truth, the court said, takes precedence over benevolence. The Federal Supreme Court upheld this, and declined even to consider the escalation to «to our complete satisfaction» that the appellant raised for the first time before it.

The French-language case law says the same thing from the other side. Summarising the doctrine, the court held in 4A_117/2007 that an employee who does not establish that his work was of above-average quality cannot claim a reference stating that he worked «to our entire satisfaction». Read together, the two make the point plainly: the grade is a factual assertion about performance, not a coded message. Moving up a rung is a question of evidence, not of interpretation.

One more detail from the same Swiss-German case is worth having. The appellant argued that the wording had left her unemployed for nearly two years. The court noted dryly that there was no evidence at all for that claim, nor for any causal link between the reference and the rejections. Courts do not presume that link; they require proof of it.

How much freedom the employer has over the wording

The choice of wording belongs in principle to the employer. In 4C.129/2003 the Federal Supreme Court set out the limits: under the principle of good faith, that freedom of drafting stops at pejorative, unclear or ambiguous terms — and, in the same list, at spelling and grammatical errors.

That last item answers a persistent story, though not in the way the story expects. Decoder lists treat a deliberate typo as a hidden demerit. In law the error is the defect in itself, whether or not anyone intended it. You do not need to prove malice to object to it — and, conversely, a typo does not turn an accurate reference into a damning one.

The same ruling sets out what the document must contain: a precise and detailed description of the activities performed and the functions held, the start and end dates of the engagement, an appraisal of the quality of the work and of the employee's conduct. The reason for the end of the employment relationship is to be mentioned where it is necessary to the overall picture of the employee. None of this is coded, and all of it is checkable line by line.

Count first, interpret later: what is missing carries the signal

Art. 330a para. 1 of the Code of Obligations entitles the employee at any time to a reference covering the nature and the duration of the employment relationship, the quality of the work and the conduct. In BGE 129 III 177 the Federal Supreme Court confirmed that a full reference must address both the work and the conduct: an employee who opts for a full reference has no right to have only one of the two assessed, because a restriction could easily give rise to misapprehension.

The same ruling holds that the short form — the simple confirmation of employment under para. 2 — may be issued only at the employee's express request, and that a confirmation issued against the employee's wishes may be refused. Nor is the choice used up once exercised: after receiving a simple reference the employee may still ask for a full one, and the other way round.

This gives you a first pass that requires no interpretation at all. Is there a paragraph on conduct? Is there a description of the actual tasks? Is there an overall assessment? A missing assessment is a defect with a name — incompleteness — and a claim behind it. A phrase read through a decoder list is neither.

What has to be in it, even when it is unwelcome

The mirror image of incompleteness is the duty to mention. In BGE 136 III 510 the Federal Supreme Court held that an illness must be mentioned in a reference where it called into question the employee's fitness to perform the job and thereby constituted an objective ground for terminating the relationship. That condition is met where the employee was unable to perform the job for more than a year and, at the end of the relationship, it was not foreseeable whether and when he would be able to do so again.

The same reasoning states the reverse: a cured illness that does not affect the assessment of performance and conduct may not be mentioned. Longer interruptions of work are to be mentioned where they weigh significantly against the total duration of the contract and their omission would create a false impression of the professional experience acquired. The circumstances of the individual case govern.

A later judgment shows how quickly this hardens into a wrong rule of thumb. In 4A_574/2017 an appellant argued that under BGE 136 III 510 an absence must last at least a year before it may be mentioned. The court rejected that: the headnote says no such thing, and the relevant reasoning turns on the weight of the absence relative to the contract. A six-and-a-half-month absence during a nine-year engagement could properly be treated as significant. Working from a memorised rule rather than the text of the ruling misleads in the same way a decoder list does.

The language your reference is read in — a Swiss problem with no foreign equivalent

One rule sits entirely outside the German reference tradition, which is why no decoder list mentions it. In 4C.129/2003 the Federal Supreme Court held that, consistently with its purpose, a reference is to be drawn up in the language customary at the place where the employment took place. Where the working language differs from that, the doctrine cited in 4A_117/2007 recognises a claim to a version in both languages — and in that Geneva case the employee complained of exactly this: his reference had been issued in English although French was the customary language of the workplace.

The mismatch is common rather than exotic. Among the active adverts in our own index, English is the language of 36.0 per cent of postings in the French-speaking cantons, 24.0 per cent in the German-speaking cantons, 20.4 per cent in Ticino and 14.9 per cent in the bilingual and trilingual cantons. In Geneva alone the English share reaches 45.4 per cent, against 53.8 per cent in French.

For someone applying from abroad this cuts both ways. A German-language reference will often be read inside an English-language selection process, where the fine gradations of the satisfaction sentence are not merely missed but untranslatable. And if you worked in Switzerland in English while the place of work spoke French or German, the language of your own reference is a question worth raising with the employer at the time it is issued — it is far easier to settle then than afterwards.

Where the unvarnished version actually travels

If the written reference must be benevolent, where does the frank assessment go? Not into a cipher, but into the spoken reference — and in June 2025 the Federal Supreme Court set out its framework in detail in 4A_493/2024. The duty to give reference information is not expressly regulated by statute; it follows from the employer's continuing duty of care after the relationship ends.

The limits are what matter. Giving such information is the processing of personal data and is subject to Art. 328b of the Code of Obligations and to the Data Protection Act; the employee's consent is a precondition for references to be lawfully sought and given. The spoken reference may make the written one more concrete or supplement it, but — in the court's words — it may not call the reference into question. A former employer who gives false information and thereby deters a hiring is liable in damages, and an arbitrary refusal to give any information at all is itself a breach of the duty of care.

That stands the folklore on its head. The decoder story assumes the truth has to be smuggled into the reference because it has nowhere else to go. In fact it has its own regulated channel — one that needs your consent and that may not undercut the document.

If you think the reference is wrong

The route starts with the employer, not the court. Where the employee considers the content untrue or incomplete after receiving it, an action for rectification is available (BGE 129 III 177). On the burden of proof, 4C.129/2003 is precise: the employer bears the burden of proving that a reference was issued if the employee disputes it, while the employee must prove the facts justifying a reference different from the one delivered.

The employer is not a bystander in that process. On the doctrine set out in 4A_117/2007, the employer must cooperate in establishing the facts and substantiate those on which a negative appraisal rests; if it refuses or fails to do so, the judge may treat the request for rectification as well founded. So the way to challenge a damning line is to ask what it is based on — not to decode it.

Expect a dispute about individual sentences rather than about an overall impression. In 4A_529/2016 the employer had adopted most of the claimant's proposed corrections during the proceedings, all except the closing sentence; the remaining claim to amend the reference was dismissed and that point became final. The famous closing line of thanks and good wishes is therefore not what the lists take it for: it is a point that can be argued, and lost.

Which authority is competent is a cantonal question — the organisation of the courts and of the conciliation authorities is left to the cantons — and public-sector employment follows its own route entirely, as the laboratory technician's case did, through a district council and an administrative court.

The negative findings, which are worth as much as the positive ones

The Code of Obligations contains no prescribed formulations, no scale of grades and no list of permitted phrases. Art. 330a runs to two paragraphs and names four subjects: nature, duration, performance, conduct. Everything else comes from case law and doctrine, not from the statute.

Nor is there any ruling of the Federal Supreme Court that endorses a decoder list or authoritatively translates a single phrase. What exists is a set of judgments about particular sentences in particular references, decided against truth, completeness and the understanding of an uninvolved third party. Read your own reference in that order — and if you find something that strikes you as untrue, incomplete or ambiguous, that is the point at which a lawyer, your union's legal service or the competent conciliation authority is useful, and a list is not.