How many requirements do I need to meet?

Why "how many" is the wrong unit

A requirements list looks like a set of equal items because it is typeset as one. The same bullet shape is doing three different jobs, though. Some lines state a condition that a document or an authority confirms. Some state a measure that can be quantified. And some are a portrait of the person the company imagines — resilient, communicative, structured, hands-on. The bullet makes them look identical, and that visual equality is exactly where the percentage arithmetic comes from.

Call the first kind a gate. A gate is verifiable without anyone forming a judgement about you: the licence exists or it does not, the certificate was issued or it was not, the registration is in the register or it is not, the language level is on the certificate. For gates, "not met" really does mean excluded, and no amount of a strong covering letter changes it. That is the only part of the list where a missing line is decisive on its own.

The second kind is countable but negotiable: years, people managed, size of the site, budget owned. The third kind is not a requirement at all. Add the three together, divide by the length of the list, and the resulting percentage tracks how verbose the person writing the advert was — nothing else. A well-written role with twelve lines then looks harder than a carelessly written one with four, when the job may be identical.

Gates: five adverts in six have none

We searched the parsed descriptions of the open adverts for any checkable item at all: a driving licence, a federal apprenticeship qualification such as EFZ or CFC, a required degree, a professional registration or recognition, a work permit, native-level language. The result is 16.6 percent with at least one and 83.4 percent with none. That is the direct answer to the question. In five cases out of six the list is a description rather than a filter — and a description cannot be under-met, only matched more or less closely.

The gates are distributed by regulation, not by difficulty. Construction and crafts name at least one in 29.1 percent of adverts, commercial administration in 27.2 percent, logistics and transport in 25.8 percent, hospitality in 20.8 percent, healthcare in 19.3 percent. At the other end sit two fields people rarely group together: IT and software at 8.8 percent and retail at 8.1 percent. The electrician needs a piece of paper; the software engineer almost never does. That is a fact about Swiss regulation, not about how demanding the work is.

This suggests an unusual reading order. Look for the gate first, not for the line you are weakest on. If there is none — the common case — then nothing in the advert stops your application before a human sees it. If there is one and you lack it, do one piece of research before giving up: for foreign qualifications, the advert does not decide, recognition does, and the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation is the body that answers on that.

One caveat, stated plainly: this is measured on the parsed description of each advert, not on the full advert text. Longer texts sometimes name more. But what survives into the description is what the role is in a few sentences — and if no gate appears there, whoever wrote the advert did not think it important enough to put near the front.

The number of years is a writing habit, not a measurement

When a requirements list contains a number, it is almost always a number of years — and it intimidates more reliably than any other line, because it looks precise. Two things show up in the open listings. First, only 8.3 percent of parsed adverts quantify experience in years at all. Nine roles in ten ask for "experience" as a word, and a word is answered by an example, not by a date.

Second, and more revealing: where a number appears, it is nearly always the same number. Of the adverts that quantify, 38 percent ask for exactly five years and 10.2 percent for exactly ten — 48.3 percent on two values. Three years accounts for 16.4 percent. Then the control check: nine years is asked by 0.3 percent, four years by 7.1 percent, six years by 2.4 percent. A distribution that piles up on round numbers is not the output of an analysis of the role. It is a convention of writing job adverts.

That changes how the line should be handled. "At least five years" means, in practice, that the person should be productive without a long ramp-up. A concrete project of the right size and complexity answers that question better than any year count — and stretching your own years answers it worst, because the interview reconciles the dates against your Swiss-style reference letters. Four years with the right examples is an application worth sending. So is two, if the example is genuinely demanding.

The one requirement that really is countable: languages

If you are going to count anything, count here. Languages are the only part of a Swiss advert where number and level can be lined up cleanly, and the only part where a gap reliably ends the conversation, because the work simply cannot happen without the language. Of the open adverts, 72.8 percent name at least one required language, and 27.6 percent of those name two or more.

The number matters less than the level stacked on top of it. Among adverts naming two or more languages, 55.8 percent demand professional or native level in every single one — not a working language plus some school French, but both at working standard. This is the line where "I meet eighty percent" genuinely does not help, because these are not points being summed. They are two conditions sitting side by side.

So the CV needs a language line that states a level rather than a mood. "Good knowledge" is not an answer to a professional-level requirement; it is a gap in the shape of an answer. The Common European Framework, A1 to C2, is the one widely understood scale. If the advert asks for professional level and you hold B2, write B2 — and put next to it where you have actually worked in that language, which is the part that persuades.

Entry-level adverts are the softest of all

The pattern runs the opposite way to expectation. Adverts with junior, trainee, internship or assistant titles flag something as explicitly optional more often than senior, lead and management titles do: 51.7 percent against 44.5 percent. The gap on years is wider still. Only 3.5 percent of entry-level adverts name a year count, against 16.6 percent of senior and leadership adverts.

That matters because career starters, returners and people arriving in Switzerland are the groups most likely to screen themselves out. The adverts they fit best are statistically the ones whose lists were written with the least intent to bind. A line they cannot tick reads to them as a barrier, even though the advert itself marked it as a preference.

The inverse holds too: senior adverts deserve closer reading. The number appears more often there, and so does a leadership requirement that is genuinely hard to skip — not because it is a gate, but because it describes the actual work. Applying for a management role having never managed anyone is applying for a different job, not for a higher rung of the same one.

On benefits, Swiss law inverts the question

For anyone registered with a regional employment centre, the legal starting point is close to the opposite of "how many boxes must I tick". Article 16 of the Unemployment Insurance Act sets the default: in the German original, the insured person must in principle accept any work without delay in order to limit the loss. The article then lists the exceptions in which work counts as unsuitable and may be refused.

One exception speaks directly to this question. Under Article 16 paragraph 2 letter b, work is unsuitable if it does not take reasonable account of the insured person's abilities or previous activity. That protects you from a placement with no relation to your occupation. It says nothing at all about hitting six lines out of ten in a requirements list. The legal test is suitability, not a close match to an advert.

Article 17 pushes further in the same direction. Someone claiming benefits must do everything that can reasonably be expected of them to avoid or shorten unemployment, and is specifically obliged to look for work, if necessary outside their previous occupation. The law therefore expects applications precisely where your history does not line up with the advert. How that is applied in your case is for your RAV to say; the direction of the expectation is in the statute.

The requirements list that does not exist

There is one case in which the question has no object at all: the speculative application. arbeit.swiss recommends it outright, writing that according to experts, jobs are frequently filled via speculative applications, and that these "are not made on the basis of a specific job advertisement". The official recommendation, in other words, is to apply where there is no list to tick.

That is a useful test of your own hesitation. If an application with no requirements list at all can be worth sending, then an application meeting eight lines out of ten cannot be pointless. The list is a working tool for the side doing the selecting, not an admission rulebook. What is missing gets weighed against the other dossiers that arrived — not against the list in the abstract.

Which leaves the single case where holding back is right: a missing gate. Applying without a driving licence to a role built around daily travel, or without recognised registration to a regulated health profession, is applying for a rejection nobody means personally. Even then the answer is rarely "do not apply" — it is "settle the gate first", and while that is running, write to the roles that have none. On the open listings, that is five adverts in six.