How much time should I spend per application?

The division that comes first

There is no universal number of minutes, because the number of minutes is not advice — it is an output. It falls out of a division: the hours you genuinely have for the job search in a week, divided by the number of suitable adverts that appear in that week. Only that division tells you whether ninety minutes is affordable or whether twenty is all you get.

Most guidance runs the calculation the other way. It fixes a duration and multiplies it by a desired volume: twenty minutes times thirty applications a month. The product looks reassuring and assumes thirty suitable roles will be there. Whether they are is a question about the market, not about your working habits.

The numerator is the easy half — an honest count of the hours that survive family, an interim job or a course. The denominator is the half almost nobody knows, and it is the half that can be measured.

What one occupation in one canton actually produces

We cut the open adverts into occupational fields and cantons and counted, for each of those slices, how many adverts were published in the last seven days. The middle slice came to three. A quarter of slices saw at most one new advert; a quarter saw seven or more. In 60.8 per cent of slices, fewer than five appeared.

Stretched over four weeks — the window in which many jobseekers count their efforts — the middle slice reaches eleven new adverts. Fewer than ten appeared in 47.6 per cent of slices, and fewer than five in 18.9 per cent.

None of this is a verdict on the Swiss labour market. It is a measurement of how narrow a single occupation in a single canton is. That narrow slice is nonetheless where most people search, because they trained in one trade and they live in one place. Planning a rate of applications that the slice can never supply is planning past yourself.

Two states: time-bound or supply-bound

There are only two situations, and they call for opposite answers. Time-bound means more suitable roles exist than your weekly hours can cover. Supply-bound means you have handled everything that fitted this week and there are hours left over.

The test takes a minute. Go back over the last week and ask whether you left a genuinely suitable advert untouched because you ran out of time. If you did, you are time-bound. If you did not — and with three new adverts in the middle slice that is the commoner case — you are supply-bound.

In the time-bound state a hard arithmetic applies. Double the minutes per application and you halve the number you send. For the same number of replies at the end of the month, the reply rate would have to double as well; triple the care and it would have to triple. That is not a claim about how much care helps. It is a rearrangement: replies are volume times rate, and volume is hours divided by duration.

In the supply-bound state that price disappears. The extra hour you put into one application costs you no other application, because the other application does not exist. Care becomes free, and the question answers itself: spend until the advert has nothing left to give, then wait for the slice to produce the next one.

The overhead nobody budgets for

Between a finished document and a submitted application sits work that has nothing to do with content: the employer's form, an account, an upload, fields that parse your CV wrongly and want fixing by hand. This overhead is usually treated as a rounding error. It is not one.

We measured how often it repeats. Draw ten open adverts at random and the tenth leads to an application route that the previous nine did not use, in 84.9 per cent of runs. Across thirty applications you meet roughly twenty-five distinct routes. The ten most common routes together cover only 32.2 per cent of open adverts, and 59.9 per cent of adverts sit on routes that each carry under half a per cent of what is open.

So the administrative part is almost always new. It does not get faster with practice, because practice rarely meets the same form twice. A realistic budget carries it as its own line rather than folding it into writing time — otherwise it eats the minutes meant for the content.

This is also why very short budgets break in practice. Twenty minutes covers the account, the form and the upload, and nothing else. Planning at twenty minutes is planning an application with no tailoring in it.

What amortises is the employer, not the advert

The encouraging finding sits in the same measurement. 72.7 per cent of the adverts that appeared in an occupation-and-canton slice in the last seven days come from an employer that already had another advert open in that same slice. In 14.8 per cent, the identical job title was already open there.

Organising your hours by employer rather than by advert therefore works with the market instead of against it. What you learn about a firm — its size, its sites, the language spoken in-house, how it cuts its roles, who signs the advert — still holds the next time that firm posts. Three times out of four, that note is still worth something next week.

The practical shape is two notes rather than one blank page. One note per employer, written once and extended. One note per role, deliberately short, holding only what this particular advert asks for.

How much the advert itself gives you to work with

Tailoring needs something to tailor to, and that raw material is unevenly distributed. 27.4 per cent of open adverts state no language requirement at all, 52.4 per cent state exactly one and 15.3 per cent state two. 22.9 per cent carry a workload percentage or a part-time marker in the title itself.

An advert that specifies nothing concrete cannot absorb ninety minutes of tailoring. What gets produced in those ninety minutes is decoration — better phrased, but attached to no requirement anyone wrote down. Time pays off in the opposite case, where the advert names several languages, a workload and a clearly bounded set of duties.

A workable rule is to read the advert once purely for how much it fixes, and to derive the length from that. Little specified means short and clean. A lot specified means the extra half hour can be pinned to concrete points rather than to atmosphere.

When the inflow is too small, the answer is not ‘faster’

If the slice yields three adverts a week and you want to send more, speed will not help. Only a wider slice will. The order of magnitude can be stated: the middle occupation-and-canton slice yields three new adverts a week. Take the same occupation across the whole of Switzerland and the middle value is roughly thirty times higher. Take the same canton across all occupational fields and it is roughly six times higher.

Both widenings cost something — one costs mobility, the other a willingness to read your own occupation more broadly. But they are the only two levers that move the denominator of the division. Speed does not move it.

For anyone who can neither commute nor widen the field, that is a clear answer to the original question. The time is there. The slice offers three applications, and six weekly hours make two hours each — not as a luxury, but because there is nothing better those hours could be spent on.

What the official guidance says about time

arbeit.swiss, the platform run by SECO and the cantonal labour market authorities, opens its application advice with a sentence that meets the question head on: “A successful job search requires time, structure and persistence – applying regularly and in a targeted way often involves a great deal of effort.” Time comes first in that list, and ‘targeted’ sits beside ‘regularly’ rather than behind it.

The ordinance places the weight the same way. Article 26 paragraph 1 of the Unemployment Insurance Ordinance requires the insured person to seek work in a targeted manner, as a rule in the form of an ordinary application. It describes a form and a direction; it names no quantity of minutes. Paragraph 2 sets the deadline for the evidence, the fifth day of the following month at the latest, and paragraph 3 makes the review monthly.

How many efforts your own RAV expects each month is not in that ordinance but in the agreement you sign with your adviser, and cantonal practice differs. For the timing question only one thing matters: that agreed number replaces the denominator of your division as soon as it exceeds what your slice supplies — and at that point the width of your search is the subject, not the length of each application.

Two hours, divided up

When the division comes out at two hours, it helps to split it along the three unequal parts. A realistic cut: around twenty minutes of administration — account, form, upload, repairing the fields that parsed wrongly. Around thirty minutes on the employer, but only for the first advert from that firm; the second costs five. What remains belongs to the advert.

The part that belongs to the advert has a natural ceiling, and the advert sets it. If three requirements are named, you are finished after three of them are evidenced. Writing on past that point means answering questions nobody asked.

One further item belongs in the budget without belonging to any application: the base dossier. Build it once and properly — structure, formats, the master version everything else is cut from. Those hours count towards every application rather than any one of them, and they are the reason the second application is quicker than the first, while the administrative part stubbornly is not.