One CV for every job, or a new one for each advert?

One CV for everything, or one per role

Tailoring is usually better but not always — at high volume in a shortage occupation, speed beats fine-tuning. The honest version: the extra hour pays where the role genuinely fits.

The real question is not how many documents, but how much of one moves

Both camps rest on a claim about the market. Send one CV everywhere and you are assuming that adverts for the same occupation ask for broadly the same thing. Start fresh every time and you are assuming each advert wants something fundamentally different. Both claims can be checked against the adverts themselves.

We built pairs: same job title, different employers, same advert language — the situation of someone applying twice in a row for the same kind of role. For each pair we measured how many of the meaning-carrying words in our short requirement summary appear in both adverts. The median is 24.7 per cent, the mean 29.9 per cent.

That number cuts both ways, which is why it is worth quoting rather than arguing over. It is well above chance — two arbitrary German-language adverts share 7.6 per cent of their wording — so a common core genuinely exists and a single document can carry it. And it is far from identity: three quarters of what an advert emphasises is particular to that advert. Sending one CV everywhere is not skipping the polish; it is skipping three quarters of the fit.

If you apply in English, expect the higher end of the range. English-language pairs share a median 31.8 per cent against 19.5 per cent for German-language pairs, and the gap is not a compliment to the English adverts: multinationals publish near-identical texts across sites and countries, so an English advert is more often a template. Two randomly drawn English adverts already share 16.3 per cent, against 7.6 per cent for two German ones. The practical reading is that a base CV travels further in English-language hiring here — and that the wording distinguishing one English advert from the next is thinner and easier to miss.

Why a Swiss CV has less room to move than the English-language internet assumes

The standard advice online — rewrite your CV for every job — comes from markets where the CV, or resume, is the entire application. When one page is all the employer receives, that page is the only instrument you can aim, so you aim it hard.

A Swiss application is a package. arbeit.swiss describes it as cover letter, CV, work references, diplomas and certificates, and it is explicit about the references: they "must not contain any gaps and must be organised chronologically, with the most recent reference coming first", with all documents summarised in one PDF file.

The consequence for this question is blunt. Whatever your Arbeitszeugnisse say cannot read differently in your CV from one application to the next. Dates, employers, job titles and workload — the Pensum, stated in per cent — are fixed. Tailoring in Switzerland therefore means something narrower than elsewhere: the headline above your name, the short profile, the order of your skills, and how much detail a given role gets. Move more than that and you have not tailored a CV, you have contradicted your own dossier.

The same official list is an argument against constant rewriting. A CV should be "complete, clear and not contain any gaps", no longer than three pages, and should contain personal details including a photograph, professional experience to date, education and training, language skills, special knowledge or activities, interests, and a note that references are available on request. There is no slot in that list for "this particular job".

Where the tailoring officially belongs: the letter

The same page places the advert-specific content precisely. The cover letter "provides a potential employer with an overview of your skills, qualifications and motivation for an advertised position" — the only element of a Swiss dossier that formally addresses one specific vacancy.

That resolves the question without anybody having to be wrong. Yes, one CV for every application is defensible in Switzerland — but only alongside a letter written fresh for each advert. And no, a CV rebuilt from zero for every application is not necessary, because the shared quarter stays put anyway and the references pin down the rest.

This also puts the effort where it pays. arbeit.swiss is candid about the cost: "applying regularly and in a targeted way often involves a great deal of effort". Spending that effort on the one document whose substance is not allowed to move is spending it in the wrong place.

How far one CV travels depends on your field

The 24.7 per cent median averages over fields that behave very differently, and the differences are the practically useful part.

A single document goes furthest in retail and sales: a median 30.0 per cent shared wording, with only 23.9 per cent of pairs below a fifth. Put the adverts side by side and the reason is visible — chains publish the same role in many locations with the same text. A second version buys little there.

It goes least far in care and nursing: 10.2 per cent, with 83.5 per cent of pairs below a fifth. Two adverts for nominally the same nursing role describe two different jobs — different ward, different shift pattern, different setting. IT and engineering sits at 15.4 per cent and finance at 15.6 per cent.

The rule of thumb costs nothing to apply. Open three current adverts in your own occupation and read them side by side. Three near-identical requirement lists mean one document is enough. Three different emphases mean it is not, and you have your answer without taking anyone’s advice on trust.

The same employer may well see you twice

93.1 per cent of the adverts we hold come from an employer that has at least one other vacancy open at the same time. Applying twice to the same company is the normal case rather than the exception, and both dossiers have a fair chance of reaching the same desk.

Yet the same employer asks for different things: two different adverts from one company, in the same language, share a median 17.4 per cent of their wording — less than two same-title adverts at different firms. The common ground is the function, not the company.

Two practical consequences. Tailoring is worth it within a single employer too. And everything checkable has to agree across your versions: two dossiers from the same person in which one job is called "team lead" in one and "administrator" in the other are hard to explain, and the references in the attachment decide which reading is right.

When one CV is genuinely the right answer

Some applications have no advert to tailor to. arbeit.swiss actively recommends speculative applications, noting that "jobs are frequently filled via speculative applications". Here the base CV is not the lazy option but the only one available — you adapt to the employer, not to a vacancy.

The same holds when your dossier goes to a private placement agency, a temporary work agency or a recruitment consultant. Your CV is taken into a pool and held against assignments that do not exist yet. A document sharpened onto one advert is worse for that purpose than a complete one.

And it holds in high-volume, highly standardised fields. If you are writing to ten retail vacancies whose texts overlap by 30 per cent, ten careful letters will do more for you than ten CV variants.

If you are relocating to Switzerland or applying from abroad

Two imported habits collide with local practice. The first is length and presentation: the official guidance allows up to three pages and lists a photograph among the personal details. Squeezing your career onto one photo-free page, the norm in much of the English-speaking world, cuts against the expectation here.

The second matters more for this question. The Arbeitszeugnisse travel with every application. In a resume-only culture you can reposition yourself per advert because nobody cross-reads a timeline. Here the timeline is attached. That is less a restriction than a relief: the part of the document people agonise over is already settled.

Then there is language. Switzerland advertises in German, French, Italian and English, and a dossier written in the language of the advert does more than any amount of rephrasing in the wrong one. That is the one case where a genuinely separate version is nearly always justified — as a translation, not as a variant. If you are applying in English, keep the Swiss terms and gloss them once: Arbeitszeugnis, Pensum, and your permit category if you need one.

The answer, one sentence per case

One CV is enough if you are applying within a standardised field, applying speculatively, or registering with an agency — provided the letter is written fresh every time.

A sharpened version earns its keep when your field advertises individually, when the role is rare, when you are changing field, or when an advert asks for something you have but have buried on page two.

A CV rebuilt from scratch for every application almost never earns its keep in Switzerland. It spends time on the shared quarter that needed no work, and where it truly becomes new it starts to contradict the references attached behind it.

If you run that loop in our CV builder, you pull the advert straight from the jobs open on SwissJobs.app instead of copying it across — the decision above stays exactly the same.