How many keywords from the advert should I reuse?

Which terms from the advert belong in the CV

There is no number. "Use 15 to 20 keywords" is invented and nobody can support it. What is useful is the distinction between terms that belong and terms that do not.

First question: is a machine reading at all?

For 51.8 per cent of open adverts the apply link goes to an address belonging to the employer itself. 35.9 per cent go into an applicant system, and 12.3 per cent to a job board or a staffing agency. The premise underneath almost every keyword guide — software filters first, a human only sees the survivors — is therefore simply not true for about half of this market. That is why the honest answer to "how many keywords" is smaller than the guides suggest: most of the time you are writing for a person.

Where a system genuinely sits behind the advert, two of them dominate. Workday accounts for 22.6 per cent of that group and Prospective for 20.8 per cent. Prospective is a Swiss provider that no English-language ATS guide mentions; its hosted application pages sit behind the Lucerne cantonal hospital, the federal administration, SBB, Helvetia, RUAG and KPMG, among others. Workday turns up more often at Roche, Swisscom, PwC, Vontobel and Julius Bär. If you are arriving from outside Switzerland, this is the part the international advice misses entirely: the system you meet at a cantonal hospital is not the one you meet at a pharmaceutical company.

Four words in the title — and some of them are not keywords at all

Across all adverts, 8.9 per cent of every word used in a title goes on formalities that say nothing about the work. In German-language adverts 38.7 per cent carry a gender marker in the title and 31.4 per cent a Pensum percentage. English-language adverts look cleaner on both counts — 11.9 per cent and 8.2 per cent — which is itself worth knowing: an English Swiss advert reads more like an international one, but the dossier the employer expects behind it is still Swiss.

An advert titled "Sachbearbeiter/in Debitoren (m/w/d) 80–100%" offers you exactly two keywords: Sachbearbeiter and Debitoren. Turning that into eight keywords means inventing six. The distribution is tight: 3.7 per cent of adverts have a single content word in the title after formalities are removed, 13.0 per cent two and 19.8 per cent three. For a good third of the market, the title is fully copied once you have taken three words.

Copy it, do not translate it

The most expensive keyword mistake is swapping in a synonym. Across all adverts for software development roles, 52.3 per cent call the role "Software Engineer", 36.0 per cent "Developer", 4.4 per cent "Softwareentwickler" and 3.0 per cent "Programmierer". Someone who writes the German compound because they are applying in a German-speaking canton is matching the wording of 4.4 per cent of the adverts for their own trade.

The pattern repeats. For project leadership, 60.9 per cent say "Projektleiter", 22.4 per cent "Project Manager" and 10.9 per cent "Chef de projet". In nursing, 75.0 per cent of German-language adverts say Pflegefachfrau, Pflegefachmann or Pflegefachperson, 17.3 per cent Fachfrau/Fachmann Gesundheit (FaGe, the three-year vocational nursing qualification) and 7.7 per cent Pflegehelfer/in — three different qualifications that must not be swapped for one another, and also three different search terms.

In practice this means the headline on your CV carries the wording of the advert you are answering right now. Apply for the same role at three employers and you have three headlines. That is not a trick; it is the only way to match a field that has no standard.

The shortest keywords matter most: EFZ, CFC, AFC

"EFZ" appears in the title of 10.2 per cent of German-language adverts — more often than almost any technical term. "dipl." follows at 3.9 per cent, "HF" at 2.7 and "FH" at 1.3. Those three or four characters are the densest keyword on the page: they name the qualification unambiguously, they are short enough for a text search to match exactly, and they cannot be paraphrased.

This is where applications from abroad regularly fall down. An advert asking for "Kaufmann EFZ" is asking for the Swiss federal vocational certificate; "commercial apprenticeship" is not the same string and will not match it. The same qualification is called CFC in French-speaking Switzerland and AFC in Ticino — CFC appears in 8.2 per cent of French-language advert titles and AFC in 17.1 per cent of Italian-language ones. If you hold it, write the abbreviation the advert writes. If you hold a foreign qualification instead, name it with the country rather than borrowing a Swiss abbreviation you do not have.

Languages are keywords — usually exactly one

A required language can be read out of the text in 71.5 per cent of adverts. Of those, 71.4 per cent ask for exactly one language, 21.6 per cent for two and 6.0 per cent for three. German is named in 66.7 per cent of them, English in 42.6, French in 21.4 and Italian in 4.0. Listing six languages on a CV to collect matches therefore serves a demand that barely exists, and dilutes the one that matters.

On wording, the CEFR scale wins. "B2" and "C1" are unambiguous, identical across all four language regions and exact for a text search; "fluent", "business fluent" and "good working knowledge" are none of those things. If the advert states a level, copy its notation. If it does not, give the CEFR level and where it comes from — a diploma, years of residence, or the language you work in.

Where the ceiling is: 371 words carry half the vocabulary

There is a measurable point past which extra keywords stop paying. Half of all title-word occurrences in the index come from just 371 distinct words — 2.7 per cent of the whole title vocabulary. The other half spreads across a very long tail: 57.6 per cent of the words used in titles appear in exactly one advert.

That is the rule behind the number ten. There is a small hard core of terms worth matching — occupation, qualification, language, sector, the dominant tool — and a vast rim of one-offs that is impossible to serve, because it changes completely with the next advert. So the right answer to "how many keywords" is not "as many as possible" but "all of the ones this single advert uses".

What this means for a Swiss dossier

Stated honestly, the mechanism is this: a CV that uses the advert's own vocabulary is found more readily by a keyword-based search than a generic one. Nothing beyond that can be claimed responsibly. Nobody outside a company can see into its filter, and nobody can promise an outcome. Anyone guaranteeing that you will "pass the ATS" is selling a claim they cannot check.

If you are relocating, two Swiss fields carry more weight than any keyword count. Nearly a third of German-language adverts state the Pensum in the title, so a CV that never says what workload you want omits the field the employer is sorting on. And a Swiss dossier expects Arbeitszeugnisse — the written employer references handed over at the end of each job — which a CV built to a US resume template has no place for. Those are not keywords in the narrow sense, but their absence is the thing that gets noticed.

By hand, or with a tool

By hand this is a ten-minute job. Print the advert, highlight the content words in the title, then highlight every term in the body that appears a second time. What is left is your list, and it is shorter than you expect.

If you would rather not repeat that for every application, the CV check on SwissJobs.app compares your dossier against a specific advert, and the CV editor produces a version tailored to one. The idea is not ours alone — cvswiss.ch sells job-first tailoring as its headline feature, and pasting the advert there gets you the same thing. The narrow, checkable difference is that there you paste the advert text yourself, while here the open Swiss adverts are already present, because the same site is also the job search.