An Indeed resume or your own CV with SwissJobs.app — what counts with Swiss firms?

The Swiss job portals at a glance

Click an image for the full-size view. What each portal actually is stands beside it.

1. 

   1. SwissJobs.appOur app

   Over 21,000 open Swiss roles from ATS systems, company sites and LinkedIn in one place — and from any advert, straight into a CV, a motivation letter, a CV check and interview prep. The RAV job-search-efforts form fills itself from your application tracker. Free to use; the account is asked for at save.

   SwissJobs.app →

2. 

   2. Indeed Switzerland

   The broadest aggregation, because Indeed also collects from other boards — at the cost of many duplicates of the same advert.

   Indeed Switzerland →

Feature comparison

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

Pricing side by side

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

The sentence the whole question turns on

In the help article "Profile and preferences: what do I share with employers?", under the CV heading, sits a line that is easy to scroll past: "If you have an Indeed CV and a CV linked to your profile, employers will only have access to the Indeed CV." Upload a carefully built document, fill in the Indeed form as well, and it is the structured version that travels — not the one you designed.

The same article lists the fields that Indeed CV knows: work experience, education, skills, certifications. Four sections. Everything a Swiss dossier carries on top of that — the photograph, the permit line, the Pensum, the Arbeitszeugnisse (the written employer references every Swiss application attaches) — has no slot in that grid. A work-authorisation field does exist, but it belongs to the profile's contact details rather than to the CV.

And employers see more than the document. Under "Online status" the article says plainly that they can see when you edited your profile and when you last visited Indeed. A PDF you email says nothing about how actively you are looking.

What Indeed tells you not to do — and why it collides here

The article on uploading a CV file carries a short "Don't" list: "Scan your CV or take a photo of it. Use photos or graphics. Use two-column layouts." The FAQ gives the reason — applicant tracking systems "work best with simple, text-based layouts", and "we don't recommend complex designs". As technical advice about a machine that has to take your text apart, that is simply correct, and it is the same advice you would get for a résumé in the United States or the United Kingdom.

arbeit.swiss describes the Swiss CV differently. Its list of usual contents opens with "personal details, including photograph", and the section closes by saying that here, too, "you can make a good impression on a potential employer with a well-presented and structured CV". The federal service recommends presentation; Indeed advises against it for its own upload. Both are right — about different readers.

That is where the decision actually sits. While your CV is sitting in Indeed's search index, the plain text version is the right one. The moment it arrives as an attachment or an upload at a Swiss employer, a person opens it, and Swiss expectations apply.

What a Swiss dossier contains, according to arbeit.swiss

The federal employment service names four parts: the cover or motivation letter, the CV, the work references with diplomas and certificates, and referees. Of the CV it says it is "the important part of your application", should be "no longer than three pages" and should run chronologically, most recent first. Language skills, special knowledge and personal interests are all listed as normal contents.

On the references it gets specific: they "must not contain any gaps", must be ordered with the most recent first, and "all documents should be summarised in a PDF file". The same goes for diplomas. Before sending, it says to check spelling, completeness and file naming, and to send everything as PDF files.

Two things follow. First, in Switzerland the CV is one item inside a bundle, not the bundle itself — a profile cannot play that role. Second, what arrives is a PDF that a human opens. That is what a document is for.

A detail worth knowing if you read the help centre in English

Requested in English on 4 September 2026, the Swiss help centre answered oddly: the topic list loaded with the Swiss flag and the label "En" but reported "No topics found", and each of the three articles quoted here returned a not-found page. In German, French and Italian every one of them opened normally. The English wording quoted above therefore comes from Indeed's English edition for another country, where the same articles are live.

There is a second localisation tell, and it is visible only if you read across the language versions. On the Swiss help centre in German, employers see your "Stadt und Bundesland" — a Bundesland being a German or Austrian federal state. The French version says "Ville et département", the Italian "Città e provincia". Switzerland has none of the three; it has cantons. The English edition for other countries says "City and region", which is the neutral wording.

None of that harms your application. It is a reasonable measure of how much Swiss convention to expect from a form that does not model Swiss geography.

What Indeed does better than we do

One thing Indeed has and we do not: it can let employers find you. The profile settings menu offers "Employers can find you" against "Employers cannot find you", and the second is the default. Switch it on and your profile is visible, employers can recommend jobs to you and can contact you through Indeed's messaging. That is an application you never wrote.

We have no equivalent at all. SwissJobs.app produces documents; it shows you to no employer. If passive discovery is what you want, keep a profile on Indeed or LinkedIn and keep it current.

Second, Indeed is free. A complete profile, a CV and a PDF download cost nothing beyond registering. If you are writing one application and then stopping, you would be paying us for something you can have there for free — an honest reason not to switch.

What we do instead — and where our file is the wrong one

At SwissJobs.app the CV is written against a particular advert. You pick the posting, the draft is generated from its wording in about a minute, and after that every line can be edited by hand or rewritten on instruction. Each application keeps its own version, with the advert text stored next to it. The base format is Swiss: room for the application photograph, a line for the B, C or G permit, language levels, the Pensum in per cent, two A4 pages. Export is PDF and Word, neither watermarked. You can build without an account; the account is asked for when you save and from the second document.

Now the limitation that this very comparison produces: our base format has a sidebar column and a place for a photograph — exactly the two things Indeed's upload guidance warns against. If you upload our file to an Indeed profile, expect the automatic import to put some content in the wrong section; Indeed describes that case in its own help article and suggests editing the profile by hand afterwards. For that route, a plain single-column version without an image is the better file.

Separately from the CV: /arbeitsbemuehungen fills the official job-search-efforts sheet from the applications you have tracked. Stated without qualification — we produce the filled sheet, your RAV, ORP or URC decides whether it is accepted, and your job-search efforts still have to be recorded where they legally count. The tool saves typing; it does not replace the recording.

Who should use which

Use the Indeed CV if you are searching there anyway, are open to being approached, and want a clean PDF quickly — and leave the visibility switch on if being found is the point. Use it too if you are applying exactly once: free beats any subscription, ours included.

Use your own document once you are applying regularly to Swiss adverts and the application lands with an employer rather than in a search index. Then what you send is what counts, and you want a version per advert, a dossier of references behind it, and a format a person enjoys reading.

For most people the sensible answer is both: keep the Indeed profile plain and visible so you can be found, and send your own document for the applications you write yourself. Every quotation on this page comes from a page opened on 4 September 2026; help articles and interfaces change, so check them before relying on them.