Which cover letter phrases sound outdated now?
Updated:
In short
Four phrases age fastest: “Please find enclosed my CV”, “I am writing to apply for the above-mentioned position”, “I trust my application will meet with your favourable consideration”, and “Yours faithfully”. Each describes a paper process that no longer happens — an envelope, a numbered vacancy, a decision you politely await. The reliable test, though, is not a style list but the advert: “secretary”, “salesman”, “personnel officer” and “data processing” together appear in 0.1 per cent of English-language Swiss advert titles, while “specialist” appears in 8.2 per cent.
There is a Swiss complication that most English-language advice gets wrong in the other direction. Phrases that Anglo-American guides list as dead filler are still the officially recommended wording here. Arbeit.swiss, the SECO job-seeker site, says plainly that you should note in your CV that references can be provided on request. Deleting that line to sound modern moves you away from the federal guidance, not towards a fresher letter.
So the question splits in two. Formulas that name a vanished object — an enclosure, a returned folder, a signature in ink — really are outdated, and replacing them costs nothing. Formulas that are merely formal are a different case: Swiss business letters are formal, in all four national languages, and a letter that reads like a chat message is not modern here, it is out of register.
Counted on the active English-language adverts on SwissJobs.app as at 23 August 2026. The count is on the job title as the employer wrote it. The bottom bar combines secretary, salesman, personnel officer, data processing and typist; each of them on its own rounds to nothing.
- “Please find enclosed my CV and supporting documents” → delete it. Nothing is enclosed when you upload a file. If the advert asks for specific documents, name them at the foot of the letter as an enclosures line — the Swiss official template keeps that line and lets you shorten it to a single word.
- “I am writing to apply for the above-mentioned position” → “I am applying for the Quality Engineer role, 80 per cent, advertised on 12 August.” “Above-mentioned” points at a reference number on a printed page. Naming the workload and the advert date tells a large employer which of several openings you mean.
- “I trust my application will meet with your favourable consideration” → “I am available for an interview from 1 October.” The first sentence asks for a decision in the passive voice. The second gives the recruiter a date they actually need in order to schedule you.
- “Yours faithfully” / “Yours sincerely” → “Kind regards”. The faithfully-versus-sincerely rule is a British letter convention tied to whether you know the addressee’s name. Swiss official templates print one neutral closing in every language: Freundliche Grüsse, Meilleures salutations, Cordiali saluti.
- “I would like to take this opportunity to express my keen interest” → “I want this job because …” followed by one concrete reason from the advert. Anything that takes an opportunity to express something is spending a sentence to announce a sentence.
- “Dear Sir or Madam” is the exception — keep it when the advert gives no name. It is the direct equivalent of the collective salutation that the Swiss career-guidance template lists as the correct form when the responsible person is not named, and no cheerful substitute (“Hi there”, “Dear Hiring Team”) is safer.
Why these particular phrases date a letter
Almost every genuinely outdated phrase has the same defect: it describes a physical event that no longer takes place. “Please find enclosed” assumes an envelope with contents. “I enclose herewith” doubles down on it. “Should you require any further documentation, I would be happy to forward it” assumes a postal exchange in which further documents travel separately. None of that survives an upload form with three file fields.
“The above-mentioned position” belongs to the era of the printed classified page, where adverts carried a reference number and letters answered by number. It is not rude or wrong today — it is simply empty, because the subject line above it already names the job. Empty is what makes a phrase sound old: the reader recognises the shape of a sentence that used to carry information and now does not.
“I trust my application will meet with your favourable consideration” and “I remain, awaiting your kind response” are the same move in the closing paragraph. They stage a decision as a favour being granted. Recruiters read hundreds of letters; the sentence in that slot that gets used is the one that says when you can start and when you can be reached.
The last family is self-diminishing: “I would like to take the liberty of”, “I hope I may be permitted to”, “please excuse me for taking up your time”. Asking permission to apply for an advertised job reads as unease rather than courtesy — and unease is the one impression a cover letter cannot afford in its first paragraph.
The advert is a better test than any style guide
Lists of dead phrases go out of date themselves, and almost all of them are written for the American or British market. There is one test that never goes stale and that is specific to the job you want: the wording of the advert. Whatever the employer wrote there is, by definition, current in that company this month.
The English-language adverts in our own index show how sharp that test is. Counting job titles as the employer wrote them: “secretary”, “salesman”, “personnel officer”, “data processing” and “typist” together account for 0.1 per cent, and each of them on its own rounds to nothing. Their replacements are everywhere — “IT”, “software”, “engineer” or “developer” in 20.1 per cent of English-language titles, “specialist” in 8.2 per cent, “sales” or “account manager” in 8.0 per cent, “HR”, “people” or “talent” in 1.6 per cent.
Not everything old-sounding has gone, though. “Clerk” is still in 1.1 per cent of English-language titles and “officer” in 1.4 per cent — both words that Anglo-American career advice has been declaring obsolete for a decade. In Switzerland they survive in banking, insurance and public administration, where the job title is often a grade in a salary system rather than a marketing choice.
The practical rule follows: copy the job title into your subject line exactly as the advert writes it, including its punctuation. The Swiss career-guidance template states this explicitly for the subject line — insert the occupation as it appears in the advert. A word taken from the advert cannot be the outdated one.
What sounds dated in English but is standard in Switzerland
This is where imported advice does real damage. Three conventions that English-language guides routinely call obsolete are, in Switzerland, either recommended by the federal employment service or printed in the official model letter.
References on request is the clearest case. Arbeit.swiss states that you should generally note in your CV that references can be provided on request, and that a separate sheet with referees can be handed over at the interview. The same sentence appears in the German, French and Italian versions of the page. Removing the line because a template blog called it filler puts you outside the local convention for no gain.
The formal salutation is the second. “Dear Sir or Madam” is not an embarrassment here; it is the English equivalent of the collective salutation that the Swiss career-guidance site lists alongside the named form, to be used “if you do not know the name of the responsible person”. What has genuinely changed is that you should look harder for a name first — but the fallback itself is intact.
The third is the enclosures line at the foot of the letter. It looks like paper, and it survives: the official template keeps it as a numbered element and allows it to be compressed to one phrase when space is short. What is outdated is the four-line inventory — CV, copies of certificates, copies of diplomas, references, passport photograph. What is not outdated is a single line naming what you attached.
Formality is not the same thing as age
English-language applicants in Switzerland tend to overcorrect. Having read that formal letters sound dated, they write to a Zurich insurer the way they would write to a start-up in Berlin: first names, contractions, an opening joke. That is not modern in this market; it is a register mistake, and it is harder to recover from than an old-fashioned phrase.
The reason is structural. A Swiss application letter is a business letter with a fixed frame — sender address, recipient address, date, subject line, salutation, closing formula and signature. Arbeit.swiss lists exactly those elements in its English version, and the German, French and Italian versions list the same ones. Formality is built into the format, not into your vocabulary, so you do not need archaic phrasing to be formal, and you cannot become modern by removing the frame.
Note also what the English-language conventions do not transfer. The faithfully-versus-sincerely rule — faithfully when you do not know the name, sincerely when you do — has no Swiss counterpart. The three official language versions of the career-guidance template each print one neutral closing regardless of whether the addressee is named. Using the British two-tier system is not wrong, but nobody here reads it as a signal, and getting it the wrong way round is a mistake only you will notice.
The workable summary: keep the frame, keep the formal salutation, keep the enclosures line and the reference note if you have them, and spend your editing on the four or five sentences you actually invented — the opener, the permission-asking clause, the passive closing, and any verb that assumes an envelope.
The market figures were counted on the adverts active on SwissJobs.app on 23 August 2026 and are given as shares, never as absolute index size. Word counts are on the job title exactly as the employer wrote it, and the denominator is those adverts whose text language is unambiguously English. The count is of a spelling, not a meaning: “IT” also captures titles where the abbreviation is part of a department name. The statements about the salutation, the enclosures line, the closing formula and the reference note are quoted from arbeit.swiss (SECO) and from the career-guidance sites run by the SDBB/CSFO on behalf of the cantons, all retrieved on 23 August 2026.
Sources
- arbeit.swiss (SECO) — Tips on applying for jobs: elements of a cover letter, references “on request”, sending as PDF
- berufsberatung.ch (SDBB) — Writing the application letter: subject line with the occupation as it appears in the advert, closing formula, enclosures line
- orientation.ch (CSFO) — Writing a cover letter, French version: “Meilleures salutations” as the printed closing
Related questions
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%
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