How many paragraphs should a cover letter have in Switzerland?

Structure of a Swiss motivation letter

One page, four paragraphs, not a CV in prose. The number of paragraphs is convention rather than rule — what matters is that each one has a job to do.

The official templates count differently — and none of them names a number

The application guidance published by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs lists what a cover letter formally contains: your postal address, the company’s postal address, the date, a subject heading, an opening salutation, a closing greeting and a signature. Seven items, none of which is a paragraph in the sense of the question. On content it says only that a good letter gives the employer an overview of your skills, your qualifications and your motivation for the advertised position. Three content dimensions, no paragraph count.

The Swiss careers-guidance template goes further. It walks through the letter part by part, and between the salutation and the closing greeting the German edition sets out exactly four blocks of prose: the introduction, your motivation and strengths, your link to the company, and a closing sentence. Four paragraphs — but the number is never stated. It only appears when you count the list.

The comparison across languages is where it gets interesting. The same template, from the same national body, runs to five prose blocks in French: introduction, who you are, your motivation and qualities, your links with the company, conclusion. The Italian edition also runs to five. French readers get a separate block for who they are; the German edition folds that into the introduction. Anyone hunting for a fixed number finds four or five depending on which language edition they open.

Both non-German editions add that the block about the company may be moved to the start of the letter. So the order is officially negotiable while the number of blocks is not. That is the real signal: there is a sensible count, and it does not live in the template — it lives in the specific vacancy you are answering.

Read the templates, then, as evidence that four to five blocks is the officially envisaged size, and take the exact number from the advert in front of you. That part can be measured.

The number is in the advert: two requirement types at the median

For every active advert whose text we have analysed, we counted how many distinct kinds of requirement it raises at all: languages, professional experience, education or a formal qualification, a named tool or system, a certificate or licence, leadership experience, willingness to travel, and unusual working hours. We count the kind, not the mention — two named software packages are one requirement type, not two.

The result is narrower than the advice literature implies. Exactly one requirement type in 10.5 percent of the adverts analysed, two in 54.1 percent, three in 28.9 percent, four in 5.0 percent and five in 0.4 percent. The mean is 2.27 and the median is two. An advert that demands six different things of you is the exception, not the norm.

By frequency the list reads: a language requirement in 97.7 percent of the adverts analysed, professional experience in 76.7 percent, education or a qualification in 31.4 percent, a named tool or system in 11.6 percent, a certificate or licence in 4.9 percent, leadership experience in 3.3 percent, willingness to travel in 0.9 percent and unusual working hours in 0.7 percent.

The paragraph count follows directly. Two requirement types means two evidence paragraphs; with an opener and a close that is four. For the 28.9 percent of adverts that raise three, it becomes five. For the 5.4 percent that raise four or more, you merge two related requirements into one paragraph — otherwise the page gives way, which is the next section.

The reverse test is just as useful. If your draft has five paragraphs and the advert states two requirement types, three of those paragraphs are about something nobody asked for. That is the commonest reason a letter reads as long and says little.

What each extra paragraph costs on the page

A paragraph costs more than its words. Each one is followed by 12 pt of space, and on an A4 page with 2.5 cm margins, Arial at 11 pt and 1.15 line spacing, that space is worth close to a full line of text. A full line in a 16 cm column carries 12.6 English words on average, and the last line of the preceding paragraph is on average only half filled. Every paragraph you open therefore costs you about 20 words of content.

On the same page: three paragraphs leave 25 lines and 303 English words. Four leave 24 lines and 284 words, five leave 23 lines and 262, six leave 22 lines and 244, seven leave 21 lines and 234. Going from four paragraphs to six costs 40 words — 14 percent of the letter — without a single new idea entering it.

What matters more than the total is what survives per paragraph. At three paragraphs each has 101 words, at four 71, at five 52, at six 41 and at seven 33. A piece of evidence is a claim, a proof and a link back to the requirement in the advert: three sentences, roughly 60 words. Below about 45 the proof goes first, and a bare claim is what remains.

That is why six paragraphs on one page is not a tidier structure but a worse one. The paragraphs turn into bullet points without bullets: "I work well in a team. I am precise. I learn quickly." Every sentence stands alone, none is evidenced, and the letter reads like a list accidentally set as prose.

Three, conversely, is too few as soon as the advert states two requirement types — one paragraph would have to answer both, or the opener would have to double as evidence. Four is the point where both sums come out: enough paragraphs for the typical two requirements, enough words in each for a proof.

The language paragraph: only from the second language onwards

Language is the single most common requirement in Swiss adverts, and it is the usual reason a four-paragraph letter becomes a five-paragraph one. Among the adverts in our index with a recorded language requirement, 72.4 percent ask for exactly one language, 20.9 percent for two, 5.8 percent for three and 0.9 percent for four. Two or more in 27.6 percent of cases; three or more in 6.7 percent.

The languages named are mostly German, in 68.1 percent of those adverts, English in 41.5 percent, French in 20.3 percent and Italian in 3.9 percent. The combination that triggers the extra paragraph is nearly always the same: the local national language plus English, or two national languages.

If the advert asks for exactly one language and you are writing in it, the requirement is already answered — by the letter itself. A paragraph explaining that you speak English, written in English, is the most expensive passage in the whole document. Half a sentence inside an evidence paragraph is enough, ideally with a level or a certificate attached.

From the second language on, that changes. The question is no longer whether you have it but at what level and in which situations — a client conversation, minutes of a meeting, a negotiation. That is a separate claim with a separate proof, which is exactly what a separate paragraph is for.

How often this hits you depends on the language the advert is written in. Among German-language adverts, 23.3 percent want two or more languages; among English-language adverts 29.9 percent; among French-language adverts 39.4 percent; among Italian-language adverts 46.1 percent. If you are applying in Ticino or the French-speaking cantons, the fifth paragraph is close to a coin flip. In German-speaking Switzerland it is not even one in four.

The four paragraphs, with their word budgets

Paragraph one, about 71 words: assignment. The job title exactly as the advert writes it, the location, the workload, and where you found the vacancy. No justification, no self-introduction. Its job is to attach your application to the right process, and then it stops.

Paragraph two, about 71 words: the first requirement, usually professional experience, because 76.7 percent of adverts raise it. Claim, proof, link. "Four years in accounts receivable at a manufacturer" is a proof; "I bring solid experience" is not. The link is the half-sentence that quotes the requirement back from the advert.

Paragraph three, about 71 words: the second requirement. Usually education or a qualification, raised by 31.4 percent of adverts, or a named tool, raised by 11.6 percent. Swiss qualifications keep their exact form — EFZ, HF, eidg. Fachausweis, CFC — because that is the form the advert uses and the form the recruiter searches for.

Paragraph four, about 71 words: the close. Your earliest possible start date as a date, a request for an interview, the closing greeting. The official template allows the closing sentence exactly two things: pleasure at hearing back, and interest in an interview.

A fifth paragraph, where the advert raises a third requirement type, sits between three and four and costs every other paragraph four or five words. That is affordable. A sixth is not: all paragraphs drop to 41 words, and evidence in 41 words is a claim with a running start.

The test: three questions per paragraph

First: which requirement from the advert does this paragraph answer? Put the advert beside the draft and write the requirement number in the margin. Paragraphs without a number are the candidates for deletion — in most drafts that is the motivation paragraph and the compliment to the employer.

Second: do two paragraphs answer the same requirement? Then they belong together. This happens routinely with experience and education when both evidence the same competence: the apprenticeship and the four years that followed it are one story, not two.

Third: does this paragraph contain something checkable? A number, a span of years, a system name, a qualification, a place. A paragraph without such an anchor spends 71 words and carries nothing the CV does not already carry. Delete it and give the words to the others.

Anyone who holds to those three questions lands on four paragraphs almost every time, occasionally five and rarely three. That is exactly the distribution the adverts predict: two requirement types at the median, three for a good quarter of them, one for roughly one in ten.

And if the application ends in a plain form field with no formatting, the count does not change — only the look does. Four blocks stay four blocks, separated by a blank line instead of paragraph spacing. The page arithmetic falls away; the requirement arithmetic does not.