How do I get more interviews?

The arithmetic behind every invitation

Interviews are not produced by effort. They are the product of three numbers multiplied together. First: how many open roles exist that you could plausibly get and that you actually lay eyes on. Second: how many of those you apply to in a month. Third: how often a submitted application produces an invitation.

Almost everyone who is short of interviews works on the second number — send more, send faster — and leaves the first untouched. That is the most expensive order to work in. The second number is capped by your own hours. The third is a rate and moves in small increments. Only the first can be doubled or multiplied by ten, and it can be done in an afternoon.

So it comes first here, and the CV comes last. Not because the dossier does not matter, but because it is the wrong dial to turn while the selection you are drawing from is too narrow.

The cantonal border is the most expensive filter in your search

Of the open Swiss adverts whose location resolves to a canton, 25,0 per cent are in Zurich, 11,0 in Bern, 8,5 in Geneva, 7,4 in Vaud, 6,4 each in Basel-Stadt and Aargau, 5,3 in Lucerne, 4,2 in St. Gallen and 4,0 in Fribourg. Everything else is spread over twenty further cantons at under four per cent each.

That distribution is why the cantonal border cuts so hard in practice. Search in Zug and only in Zug, and you are working with 3,0 per cent of the country. Add Zurich, Lucerne, Schwyz and Aargau — all roughly an hour from Zug — and it becomes 40,6 per cent. That is 13,6 times as much, without changing a line of the dossier.

The same calculation elsewhere: Thurgau 11,3 times, Solothurn 10,4, Aargau 9,4, St. Gallen 8,3, Lucerne 7,8, Bern 2,8, Basel-Stadt 2,4. For the smallest cantons the factor becomes absurd — Schaffhausen 35,2, Jura 42,7 — which only means that in those places essentially the entire reachable working world lies across the border.

None of this is an exotic suggestion. The Federal Statistical Office counted eight in ten employed people as commuters in 2024; 71 per cent of them worked outside their home municipality, up from 58 per cent in 1990. The average commute is 14 km and 30 minutes one way, just under half by car and 31 per cent by public transport. A search restricted to one canton is narrower than the way the Swiss labour market actually works.

If you are arriving, this decision is made before your CV is

People relocating to Switzerland usually choose the town first — a job offer, a partner's job, an international employer, a school — and then start searching from wherever that landed them. The map above shows what that costs. A base in Zug or Aargau is excellent if you also search the neighbouring cantons and thin if you do not.

It also cuts the other way, and this is the part people arriving get wrong most often. Zurich gains only 1,9 times from widening, Geneva only 1,9 times with Vaud added. Those are already the market. If you are in Zurich and short of interviews, the easy lever is spent; the gains have to come from the search terms and from the individual application.

One more thing that surprises arrivals: Switzerland is small enough that a canton is not a region in the sense you are used to. Thirty minutes crosses two or three of them. Treating your canton as the search area is the equivalent of restricting a search to one postcode.

Your search term is the second filter, and the least visible one

Most people search with the job title from their last contract. That is exactly one of the several words under which the same work is advertised here.

In the open stock it looks like this. In accounting, fiduciary services and finance, the largest single title reaches just 18,5 per cent of the field («Controller»), followed by «Accountant» at 16,3, «Treuhänder» at 16,2, payroll titles at 13,8 and «Buchhalter» at 11,8 per cent. In administrative and back-office roles the largest title reaches 28,7 per cent; in software development 38,9 («Software Engineer», with «Developer» at 24,3); in nursing 44,3. Only in project management does one word cover more than half: «Projektleiter» reaches 61,5 per cent, with «Project Manager» adding 19,7.

The number that matters is the remainder. In four of the five fields tested, a search on a single term hides more than half the suitable adverts before anyone has seen a CV.

For an English-speaking searcher there is a second layer to this. Only 19,9 per cent of German-language adverts carry an English job word in their title, and 19,1 per cent of French-language ones. So an English-only keyword list finds the international-facing slice and misses the rest — including roles whose working language is in fact English but whose advert was written in German. If you can read a German or French advert well enough to decide whether to apply, searching in those languages is a larger gain than any wording change to your CV.

It is worth being blunt about the underlying gate, because it is the honest half of the answer: a national language at professional level is a genuine requirement in a large part of this market, and no search technique replaces it. What the term list changes is how much of the part you do qualify for you actually see.

The channels the official service names first

berufsberatung.ch, the careers service run by the SDBB on behalf of the cantons, compresses its job-search advice into one line: use every channel in order to find the job you want faster. The channels it lists are your personal and professional circle, job portals with a saved search profile, specialised portals, social networks, private placement agencies — free of charge for the jobseeker — and unsolicited applications, which it says are welcome at large companies and worth targeting if you are specialised.

It attaches a caveat to the first one that is rarely printed: weigh up carefully whom you tell, so as not to endanger the job you currently hold. If you are searching while still employed, that channel is only partly available to you.

With portals, the real gain is not in searching but in saving. A search profile or job alert reverses the order: instead of paging through a stock in which the median advert has been online for about a month, you see each new advert on the day it appears. If you are registered with the RAV you can also register for Job-Room; arbeit.swiss names two specific benefits, early information about reported vacancies under the job-reporting obligation, and the digital functions for setting up a job alert and creating watchlists.

Job-search efforts, incidentally, only count when they are reported to the RAV or recorded in Job-Room. Nothing — including anything we build — replaces that step; it can only prepare it.

The same job title is not the same job

That leaves the third number: how often a submitted application produces an invitation. The most useful measure here is not what employers say, but how different their adverts actually are.

We compared pairs of open adverts carrying exactly the same normalised job title but posted by two different employers, and counted what share of their content vocabulary they have in common. Across all languages the mean is 12,6 per cent. In 84,0 per cent of those pairs the overlap is under a fifth; in only 4,9 per cent is it over a half. Two reference points from the same calculation: two unrelated adverts share 2,1 per cent, and two adverts with the same title at the same employer share 29,6 per cent.

So the title tells you something — six times more than chance — but less than half of what the employer itself repeats. Two adverts for a «Customer Service Specialist» at two different companies are, in wording, more than four fifths different documents. A dossier that answers the title is answering the smaller part of the advert.

The language split is where this gets interesting for an English-language reader, and it does not run in your favour. English-language adverts in Switzerland are the most standardised segment: two of them with the same title from different employers share 36,7 per cent of their vocabulary, and more than a quarter of such pairs share over half. German-language adverts share 10,7 per cent. English postings here carry more boilerplate — the culture paragraph, the equal-opportunity line, the benefits list — so there is less advert-specific material to answer. That makes reach and search terms the bigger levers for you, and it makes the specific parts of an English advert that are not boilerplate the ones worth mirroring exactly.

In practice: the title decides which pile you land in, the advert decides what has to be on the first page of your CV. That is where comparing your own dossier against one concrete advert beats any general rewrite, and it is where our CV check works.

What the RAV can add, and what it does not replace

If you are registered with the RAV — the regional employment centre, called ORP in French-speaking Switzerland and URC in Ticino — you have a counterpart for exactly these questions, and most people experience it only as a compliance desk.

arbeit.swiss describes the joint review of your professional situation and lists «your job search strategy» and «your options on the current labour market» among its points, adding that the existing strategy can be reviewed, adapted and, where necessary, critically assessed. On career prospects the same page names the axis this answer turns on: changes in the labour market are taken into account, among them new requirements in certain occupations, shifting demand by qualification, and «regional differences in jobs available».

Then there are labour market measures. Their stated goal, in the words of arbeit.swiss, is to improve jobseekers' employability and increase their chances of finding permanent employment; the page names broadening specialist knowledge, learning new techniques and methods, and explicitly building a professional network. Two details that are not widely known: insured persons may submit a request to take part on their own initiative at any time, and for courses and training placements the request must be filed at least ten days before the measure begins. People not yet entitled to unemployment benefit but at risk of unemployment may have part of the course costs covered.

The RAV decides which measure is appropriate, and practice differs by canton. arbeit.swiss also states plainly that counselling and placement support your own job search rather than replace it.

What sending more applications actually buys you

That leaves the middle number, the one that gets nearly all the attention: how many applications you write per month. It works, but it works linearly, and it consumes the time the other two levers need. Ten more applications raise the expected number of interviews by ten times your conversion rate. A doubled selection raises it by a factor of two, on everything that follows.

There is also a feedback effect that the arithmetic hides. Conversion falls once volume rises past the point where you can still adapt anything per advert. Swiss staffing agencies describe exactly this from the other side: dossiers that visibly had to reach a number.

None of which means fewer applications are better. It means the order matters: open the selection first, then raise the volume, and only as far as each individual application still answers its own advert.

Where this answer stops

Every market figure here describes our stock of open Swiss adverts on one day, not the whole Swiss labour market. Roles that are never publicly advertised are, by definition, not in it.

The radius factors add neighbouring cantons; they are not door-to-door journey times. Whether Zurich is an hour from Zug depends on where in Zug you are and how you travel. Whether a commute is reasonable is your decision, and if you are registered with the RAV it is also a question of the suitability rules your own RAV applies.

And the honest caveat last: in some sectors conditions really have got worse, independently of any search strategy. Someone searching in such a field is turning the same three dials on a smaller population. That is not a failure of strategy, it is a property of the market — and a reason to make the field itself the subject of the next RAV conversation.