How do I personalise a cover letter quickly?

Most of a Swiss cover letter is not personal at all

arbeit.swiss, the federal jobseeker portal, lists what a cover letter should contain: your postal address, the company’s postal address, the date, a subject heading, an opening salutation, a closing greeting and a signature. Of those seven elements exactly two change between applications — the company address and the subject heading. The rest is formatting you set up once and never touch again.

That is why the honest answer to «how do I do this quickly» is: build the master file first. The Swiss careers service makes the same point as a practical tip — send PDFs, but keep the editable version of the CV and the letter so you can copy and adapt it for each new application. The instruction to write a separate letter for every vacancy sits on the same page and does not contradict it. A separate letter means a letter that answers this advert, not a letter that starts from an empty document.

The five slots

One, the subject heading: the job title exactly as the advert writes it, plus the reference number or posting date if there is one, plus where you saw it. Two, the salutation, with the name from the advert. Three, a reference sentence saying which vacancy this is and what in it actually made you apply — a task, a tool, a site, not the company in general.

Four, the paragraph that takes two or three requirements from the advert and puts one piece of your own record beside each. Use the advert’s nouns. If the advert asks for accounts receivable and you write «finance experience», you have thrown away the one match you are writing about. Five, the closing line: workload as a figure, availability as a date, and your notice period if you are currently employed — in Switzerland that is routinely one to three months, and leaving it out invites a follow-up email that costs you a day.

Five slots is the whole job. If they are right, the letter is personalised, even though the paragraphs around them came out of your master file.

Why the title line is the fastest material in the advert

You do not have to invent the subject heading. The official careers guidance tells applicants to put the occupation in exactly as it appears in the advert — pure copying, and still the single most effective field in the letter. The reason lies in how adverts are actually written. In our count of live adverts, an English-language title runs to five words in the median, and nine in ten titles across all languages fit into nine words or fewer.

Those few words carry a surprising amount of signal. 74.3 per cent of English-language adverts have a title that no other active advert shares, and 91.3 per cent of all titles contain at least one term appearing in under half a per cent of adverts. The scarce, specific vocabulary you would otherwise hunt for in the body text is usually sitting in the headline, three seconds into reading.

The workload trap for English-language applications

Swiss adverts often state the job as a percentage — 80–100 per cent rather than «full time». That habit is much stronger in German: 29.1 per cent of German-language adverts put a percentage in the title, against 18.5 per cent in French and only 9.1 per cent in English-language ones. If you are applying in English, the advert will frequently not tell you what workload is on offer, and your letter is the place to say what you want.

Where a percentage does appear, it is usually a range: 57.4 per cent of adverts stating a workload state a span rather than a fixed figure. A span is an open question, and closing it is the cheapest personalisation there is. Answer with one number inside the range instead of repeating the range back. Four words, and you have replied to something the employer explicitly left open.

Say which job — the numbers behind that

«I am writing to apply for a position at your company» is not just bland, it is often ambiguous. 92.3 per cent of live adverts come from employers running at least two different open titles at the same time, and 21.1 per cent come from employers with the same title open more than once — two branches, two shifts, two teams. The twenty largest posters in the index account for 26.3 per cent of all live adverts between them.

Identifying the vacancy is therefore personalisation in itself, and it costs nothing: exact title in the subject heading, reference or date beside it, the same title again in the email subject. Both official sources add the same small step — give your files clear, unambiguous names. A file called cover-letter-quality-engineer-burgdorf.pdf survives being downloaded into a folder with forty others; one called letter_final2.pdf does not.

What to cut, because it is slow and it does not travel

The paragraph about the company’s history, the sentence about its long tradition, the quoted line from the mission statement: these feel like personalisation while you write them, but swap the company name and they fit anywhere. They are also the most expensive part of the letter in minutes, because they require reading a second source.

Cut too: the retelling of your CV, the string of adjectives about your own motivation, and any sentence you used yesterday for a different role. Put the time into slot four instead — two or three requirements, one piece of evidence each. That is the only paragraph in the letter that genuinely cannot be reused, which is exactly why it is the one worth the effort.

Which advert to write first

Speed pays off unevenly. In our count, the median live advert is 19 days old, 37.9 per cent are more than 30 days old, and only 13.8 per cent appeared in the last seven days. Fresh postings are the minority — and they are the ones where the day you write matters. On a two-month-old advert, care matters more than the hour.

In practice: sort by posting date, not by how much you like the company. The newest advert gets the first twelve-minute round; the older ones can wait until tomorrow morning. Doing it the other way round means polishing an application for a role that may already be at final-interview stage.

The sixty-second check, and the language question

At the end, read only the five swapped passages aloud and nothing else. Any sentence that could be sent unchanged to a different employer is not a personalised sentence; delete it or tie it back to a word from the advert. The test takes a minute and is more reliable than how the letter felt while you were writing it.

One thing worth checking before you send: the language. Among live adverts where a language is detected, 56.1 per cent are German, 27.2 per cent English, 13.1 per cent French and 2.2 per cent Italian. 72.8 per cent of adverts carry a stated language requirement, and 27.6 per cent of those name two languages or more. Reply in the language the advert is written in. It is the fastest form of personalisation and the least negotiable one — an English letter answering a German advert reads as a letter that was going out anyway.