Is my CV too generic?

Updated: 23 August 2026

In short

Stop judging it by feel and compare it to the market. English-language adverts in Switzerland name their own roles with five words at the median; 50.4 per cent use five or more, only 1 per cent use a single word, and 73 per cent carry a title that appears nowhere else in our rolling analysis. Your CV is too generic when it describes you in fewer terms than the advert uses to describe the job. That gap is usually one headline and three lines wide, not a rewrite.

The reason the question is hard to answer alone is that «generic» sounds like taste. It is not. There is an external ruler, and it sits in the adverts you are applying to: the market states its own roles at a certain resolution, and that resolution can be counted.

So the comparison is not your CV against an ideal CV. It is your self-description against the market's description width. When the advert says «Cloud Security Engineer, Zurich» and your CV says «IT Engineer», nothing about your experience is missing — the words that place it are.

How many words English-language Swiss adverts use for their own job title

Share of English-language adverts in our index by title length, after gender markers, workload percentages and punctuation were stripped. Rolling analysis of open Swiss listings, August 2026.

73 per cent of English-language adverts carry a job title that occurs only once in the whole index. Across all languages it is 67.7 per cent. The advert your CV is answering is almost always a one-off; a category headline is not.
Seniority is written, not implied. «Senior» appears in the title of 29.9 per cent of adverts containing «Consultant», 22.2 per cent of those containing «Engineer», 16.3 per cent of «Manager» and 15.7 per cent of «Specialist» adverts. «Junior» appears in only 0.9 per cent of all titles.
No single specialisation dominates, so none can be copied. Inside the «Engineer» family the most frequent extra word is «System» at 16.6 per cent, then Software at 10.5, Security at 8.3, Network at 7.4 and Cloud at 6.6 per cent.
Specific does not mean tool names. Only 1.7 per cent of all titles in the index name a piece of software or a technology, while 15.6 per cent state a level. The market separates roles by domain, function, market segment and scope.
29.6 per cent of English-language adverts name two or more required languages; 14.5 per cent ask for German at professional level and a further 7.8 per cent at conversational level. An English CV with no language line is generic exactly where Swiss employers read closely.

A definition of generic you can actually test

A line is generic when a different person applying for a different job could have written it word for word. That definition is useful because you can check it without an opinion: you are not asking whether your CV is good, you are asking whether it is interchangeable.

To keep the check from turning back into taste, it needs an outside standard. We reduced every Swiss advert in the index to its job title, removed gender markers such as «(m/f/d)», workload percentages and punctuation, and counted how precisely the market names its own vacancies.

The answer is unambiguous. Across all languages the median title runs to four words, 79.1 per cent use three or more, and 42.4 per cent use five or more. In the English-language part of the market the bar is higher still: five words at the median and 50.4 per cent at five or more.

Set against that, a CV that introduces you with «Project Manager» or «Marketing Professional» is not slightly shorter than the market. It is roughly five times coarser. That is the whole of the problem: the experience is not too general, the resolution you state it at is.

The English-language corner is the most specific part of the Swiss market

It is worth knowing which market you are writing into, because the two big language segments are not equally precise. German-language adverts use one word for the title in 6.5 per cent of cases and five or more in 35.2 per cent. English-language adverts use one word in 1 per cent of cases and five or more in 50.4 per cent.

The share of one-off titles moves the same way: 67.2 per cent for German-language adverts against 73 per cent for English-language ones. If you are applying in English in Switzerland — international employers, pharma, banking, technology — you are applying into the segment that draws the finest distinctions, and a generic CV stands out most there.

The pattern holds in French too, which matters for anyone applying across the language border: French-language adverts run to five words at the median and 56.8 per cent use five or more, the highest share of any segment.

None of this is about writing longer. It is about writing at the same resolution as the person on the other side. A four-word headline is not a longer CV; it is a CV that answers the first question the advert asks.

What Swiss adverts actually specify

When people hear «be more specific» they reach for tool names. The data says otherwise: only 1.7 per cent of the titles in our index name a piece of software or technology at all. The precision the market uses is of four other kinds, and you can read them straight off the extra words in the titles.

The first is domain. In the «Engineer» family: system, software, security, network, cloud, infrastructure, platform. In «Consultant»: data, tax, security, SAP. The second is function within the process — support, operations, service, quality, development. This is the type most often missing from a CV, and it is the cheapest to add, because it needs no new experience, only a name.

The third is market or customer segment: «Sales» appears in 8.9 per cent of «Manager» titles, «Account» in 10.6 per cent, «Product» in 6.7 per cent, «Business» in 5.8 per cent. The fourth is scope and level: 15.6 per cent of all titles carry a level word, 7.1 per cent «Senior», 3.1 per cent «Lead» or «Head».

Read together they form a simple template for your own headline: role, domain, function, and — if you have one — level. Four slots, most of which you can fill from memory in a minute.

The paste test: three questions per line

Go through the document line by line. First question: could someone else, applying somewhere else, have written this sentence unchanged? If yes, it carries nothing. Second: does the line contain a number, a domain, a system, a size or a place? If none of those, it is a claim rather than evidence. Third: would anyone ever write the opposite? Nobody writes «poor team player» or «resistant to change», so the positive version of those words separates no one from anyone.

What fails the test rarely needs deleting — it needs demoting and replacing. «Experienced project manager, strong communicator» becomes «Project Manager, building services, three sites, CHF 4 million budget, handover to operations». Same person, same job, same truth, written in the words the advert itself uses.

In a commercial role: «Sales Manager with a proven track record» becomes «Sales Manager, mid-market SaaS, Switzerland and Austria, thirty-two accounts, renewal rate reported quarterly». In IT: «Senior Engineer, versatile» becomes «System Engineer, Windows server estate for around four hundred workplaces, migration across two sites».

The work is concentrated at the top of the page. Headline, two or three lines under it, and half a sentence per role are enough. Rewriting the whole CV to feel less generic is effort spent on the eighty per cent that was never the problem.

Broad is not the same as generic

These two get confused constantly. A broad CV shows many different roles, industries or tasks. A generic CV shows none of them — it shows categories. Breadth is a profile; genericness is the absence of one, and only the second costs you interviews.

For career changers and generalists that means: do not cut the variety, name the axis it sits on. «Administration across three industries, always at the seam between order intake and accounting» is broad and precise at once. «Versatile and adaptable» is only generic.

There is a useful counter-test. If two very different adverts seem to fit your CV equally well, that is rarely because you fit both. More often the document says too little to conflict with either. Precision costs you compatibility — that is its price and its point.

It costs less than people fear, though. Because no single specialisation dominates any family in the index, a precise headline does not lock you out of the market. It moves you out of the large undecided pile and into the small pile that matches the advert.

The two facts an English CV in Switzerland most often leaves out

The first is languages, stated as levels. 29.6 per cent of English-language adverts in our index require two or more languages; 14.5 per cent want German at professional level and 7.8 per cent at conversational level, and 6 per cent want French professionally. A CV that says «English (fluent), some German» is answering a question the advert asked in a different unit.

Write the levels the way the adverts do: which language, at what working level, and whether that level is current. It is one line, and in a market where four out of five adverts state a language requirement it is the line most often compared directly against the advert.

The second is where the work sits and how it is framed. 38.8 per cent of English-language adverts do not state an employment type at all, and only 4.5 per cent of all titles name a city. What the advert leaves unstated, the reader will look for in your CV instead — availability, location, and the radius you are willing to work in.

Both fixes take a quarter of an hour. Open three adverts you genuinely intend to apply to, list the words that appear in all three and are missing from your CV, and put them where they belong: in the headline and in the top role. After that, «too generic?» is no longer a feeling but a question you have answered.

Market figures come from the rolling analysis of the Swiss listings open on SwissJobs.app, as of 23 August 2026. For the title analysis, gender markers, workload percentages, brackets and punctuation were stripped and titles compared in lower case; «one-off» means the cleaned title occurs exactly once in the index. All figures are shares of the relevant set rather than absolute counts.

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Sources

What our job index says about the Swiss market

Computed live from our own index, not quoted from a study. Shares only, as of today.

Language the advert is written in

Deutsch: 60%
English: 23%
Français: 13%
Italiano: 3%

Of adverts that state a language requirement, the share asking for

Deutsch: 70%
English: 43%
Français: 21%
Italiano: 3%

19% posted in the last 7 days · Largest markets: Zürich 18% · Bern 10% · Genève 5% · Basel 5%