How do I start a cover letter in Switzerland?

The Swiss opening has a part the American one does not

If you have written cover letters in the United States, the United Kingdom or Ireland, the opening you know starts at the salutation: ‘Dear Hiring Manager’, then a sentence with a hook. A Swiss letter is a business letter, and it has a line above the salutation that carries the whole identification job.

The federal jobseeker guidance is specific. A cover letter should contain your postal address, the company’s postal address, the date, a subject heading, an opening salutation, a closing greeting and a signature. The same list appears in the German, French and Italian versions of that page — Betreffzeile, objet, oggetto. It is not an optional flourish. A Swiss letter without a subject line reads as an incomplete document rather than an unconventional one.

The wording of that line is prescribed in one place: the Swiss careers-guidance service publishes a letter template in German, French and Italian which specifies the subject line as an application for the position, with the occupation inserted as it appears in the advert, set in bold. There is no English version of that template — the English federal page lists the parts without prescribing their wording — so the English-language applicant inherits the rule through the same market and the same advert.

The practical consequence is that your first editorial decision is not what to say about yourself. It is what to copy and what to strike out of a line somebody else wrote.

Copy the title, minus the tag

We counted every live advert title in our index. Overall, 47 percent cannot be pasted into a subject line unchanged, because they carry a gender tag, a workload percentage or both. English-language titles are the second cleanest of the four — 18 percent need an edit, against 62.7 percent in German, 41.4 percent in French and 10.9 percent in Italian.

The gender tag goes. In English adverts it usually shows as (m/f/d), (f/m/d) or (m/f/x); across all languages it appears in 33.1 percent of titles, and in 0.5 percent it takes the written form (all genders). It states how the employer is advertising, not what the job is called. ‘Solutions Architect (Hybrid; m/f/x/d; 80-100%)’ becomes ‘Application for the position of Solutions Architect, 80–100 percent’.

The reference number goes too. 10.7 percent of English-language titles contain a run of three or more digits, usually a requisition number. It belongs one line below the subject or in the covering e-mail, where it does its job without crowding the line. The same is true of trailing additions such as a second location or a contract note.

Block capitals go back to sentence case. 14.6 percent of English-language titles contain a word set entirely in capitals. In the advert that is a design choice; in your subject line it reads as shouting. Reset the word, keep the spelling of the occupation itself.

What stays: the qualifier that distinguishes the role. ‘Senior’, ‘Lead’, ‘Deputy’ and their equivalents appear in 26.9 percent of English-language titles — the highest share of the four languages — and they are the single most load-bearing word in the line. An advert for a Senior Data Engineer and one for a Data Engineer at the same company are two different vacancies and often two different hiring managers.

The English-language advert is the one least likely to tell you the workload

Switzerland runs on percentages. A job is a 100 percent, an 80 percent or a 60–80 percent, and the number is part of the vacancy in a way that ‘full-time’ is not. But whether the advert tells you depends heavily on the language it was written in: 29.1 percent of German-language titles carry a percentage, 18.5 percent of French, 9.1 percent of English and 3.6 percent of Italian.

The structured field is not much better. Across all live adverts, 82.3 percent are marked full time, 5.5 percent part time, and 9.5 percent carry no employment-type statement at all. So for a large share of English-language vacancies, nothing in the advert commits to a workload.

That silence is your job to close, in the opening sentence, because it is the first thing an employer will check against their own headcount. ‘I am applying for the position of Quality Engineer at 100 percent, advertised on 12 August on your careers page, and I am available from 1 November’ answers the identification question and the workload question in one line.

If you can work a range, say the range rather than the maximum. Where employers state a range themselves they overwhelmingly write it as one — 62 percent of the adverts that carry a percentage carry two numbers rather than one — so a range in your first sentence reads as normal Swiss practice, not as hedging.

Whom to address when nobody is named

The Swiss careers-guidance template puts both cases side by side: the name of the responsible person if the advert gives one, and the general form if it does not. In German that general form is ‘Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren’; in French ‘Madame, Monsieur,’; in Italian ‘Gentili signore, egregi signori’. In English, ‘Dear Sir or Madam’ is the direct equivalent. It is the prescribed solution, not a fallback that costs you points.

Two structural facts in our index explain how often it is needed. 12.1 percent of live adverts are placed by a recruitment agency or personnel consultancy rather than by the employer — in those, the employer is often not even named until a first conversation. And 37.6 percent of all live adverts come from the 1.7 percent of employers who have fifty or more vacancies open at once, where applications route to a shared address rather than to a person.

Two failure modes follow from trying to paper over the gap. The first is the unresolved template — ‘Dear Sir/Madam,’ written as ‘Dear Mr/Ms’ with the slash left in, which only shows that you did not finish the document. The second is the name lifted from the company’s legal notice: writing to a managing director because nobody else was findable puts your letter with someone who has to forward it.

If a name is there, use it in full and spell it correctly, with the title the advert uses. Swiss letters stay formal well past the first interview; a first name in the salutation is not warmth, it is a register error.

Say where you saw it, and when

The official template asks for it directly: state that you are applying and mention where you found the vacancy. The French edition of the same page gives the reason — some employers want to know which channel their applicants came through.

Our own data shows why the sentence carries information rather than courtesy. Application destinations are extremely dispersed: the largest single destination takes 10.6 percent of live adverts, the top ten together 32 percent, the top fifty 50.7 percent, and 45.1 percent of destinations appear exactly once. The same vacancy is frequently visible in several places at once, and your sentence is the only feedback the employer gets about which one worked.

The second reason is ambiguity. 26.6 percent of live adverts share their exact title with at least one other live advert, and 10.2 percent share it with a different employer. Within a single employer, 19.9 percent of adverts sit alongside another advert with the identical title — different site, different workload. Only 3.7 percent of English-language titles name a place of work and only 1.2 percent of all titles name the employer. The title alone often does not identify your vacancy.

That is also why a date belongs in the sentence. The median live advert in our index is nineteen days old; a quarter are under ten days, a quarter over 66, and 13.5 percent are less than a week old. ‘Your advert of 12 August’ costs four words and tells the recruiter which posting round you came from.

Six openings that do not work

‘I am writing to apply for the above position.’ It tells the reader that a letter exists, which the document already proves. It names neither the title, nor the workload, nor the source — and leaves open the exact question the recipient has to answer first: which of their vacancies this is.

‘I was excited to see your posting.’ Enthusiasm is the precondition for writing at all, not information. If the sentence survives deleting the word ‘excited’ with no loss, there was nothing in it.

‘Your company is a global leader in its field.’ Two problems. It says nothing about you, and in 12.1 percent of adverts the employer is not the party who placed the advert — the compliment then lands with an agency that would have to pass it on.

‘As a highly motivated team player seeking a new challenge …’ Every one of those words has been used in every letter the reader has seen this month. Worse, it describes your state rather than the vacancy, so it fits any advert you have ever read.

‘My name is … and I am 34 years old.’ Your name is already in the sender block, the signature and the file name; the age has no place in the letter at all. The first sentence is the highest-attention line in the document, and spending it on facts printed three times elsewhere is the most expensive mistake of the opening.

‘Dear Sir or Madam, I would like to join your team.’ Too vague to be routed. In a company advertising dozens of roles at once — and 37.6 percent of live adverts come from companies of that size — a letter with no title and no workload goes to the general-enquiries pile.