Proof of job-search efforts: what makes an application count

The form is in German, French or Italian — here is what each column wants

There is no English version of «Nachweis der persönlichen Arbeitsbemühungen» — «Preuves des recherches personnelles effectuées en vue de trouver un emploi» in French, «Prova degli sforzi personali intrapresi per trovare lavoro» in Italian. That alone causes half the confusion, so here is the grid, column by column.

«Datum der Bewerbung» is the day you applied, with day and month — not the day you fill in the sheet. «Firma, Adresse» is the employer and its address. «Kontaktperson, Telefon-Nr.» is the person and their number; this is the only column that connects your entry to the outside world. «Stellenbezeichnung» is the job title you applied for. «Zuweisung RAV» is a tick, and only for a vacancy the office assigned to you. «Pensum» is full time, or part time with a percentage.

The last two groups are tick boxes. Under «Bewerbung» you mark how you applied: «brieflich / elektronisch» for a letter or an email, «persönlich» for in person, «telefonisch» by telephone. Under «Ergebnis der Bewerbung» you mark what happened: «noch offen» still open, «Vorstellungsgespräch» interview, «Anstellung» hired, «Absage» rejected, with a small field for the reason given.

Read that list once more and notice what is missing. No reference number, no link, no field for the platform where you found the job. Nothing in the official record of your job search asks where the vacancy came from.

What the law actually requires

The duty sits in art. 17 para. 1 of the unemployment insurance act (AVIG/LACI), and the decisive sentence is the shortest one: the insured person must be able to prove their efforts. What has to be proven is the effort, not the vacancy. The implementing ordinance adds the form it should take — art. 26 para. 1 AVIV requires targeted efforts, «as a rule in the form of an ordinary application». Neither provision mentions an advert.

The French wording of the same article is the clearest of the three official versions: the insured must target their job search «selon les méthodes de postulation ordinaires», by the ordinary methods of applying. Writing to an employer that is not currently advertising is an ordinary method of applying, and was one long before job portals existed.

How the cantonal offices apply this is set out in the SECO directive on unemployment benefit, in force since 1 January 2026. Marginal note B321 compresses the whole standard into three sentences: the insured person must prove their job-search efforts, must supply the office with written details of them for every control period, and those evidenced efforts must be capable of being checked. Verifiability is the test, and it is the only test.

Marginal note B313 removes the other worry that comes with speculative applications: whether the efforts actually succeed is irrelevant. An application nobody ever answers counts exactly as much as one that leads to an interview, provided it is documented.

What makes an entry checkable

Checkable means somebody could ring up and get an answer. In practice that is four things: a name that exists, a route to that person — a phone number, or the address your letter went to — the date you actually sent it, and the outcome as it stood on that date.

For a speculative application the contact is usually the head of the department you want to work in, or whoever is named for personnel on the company's imprint page. If you phoned first to find out who the application should go to, that call is itself part of the record: it explains where the name came from.

Build the record the same day. Swiss social insurance law works on that principle itself — art. 43 para. 1 of the general part (ATSG/LPGA) requires that information given orally be recorded in writing. Reconstructing a month of applications on the fourth of the following month produces dates you can no longer support, and dates are the part the office checks first.

If you applied through an employer's own application portal, the acknowledgement email is your evidence. It carries the date, the employer and usually a reference of its own, and it survives the vacancy being taken down. File it rather than deleting it.

If the lead came out of a conversation — a fair, a club, a former colleague — keep a note of who pointed you there in your own file, and put only the person your application actually went to on the form. The introduction is the occasion; the application is the effort.

The one entry you must never invent

Because the contact column carries so much weight, the temptation is to fill it in even when you spoke to nobody. That is the most expensive mistake in this whole area, because it does not fall under insufficient efforts at all. Art. 30 para. 1 let. e AVIG suspends entitlement for anyone who has given false or incomplete information, and the form repeats the point next to the signature line: false or incomplete statements are a criminal offence under art. 105 ff. AVIG.

The office is entitled to check. Art. 43 para. 1 ATSG obliges the insurer to carry out the necessary investigations of its own motion and to obtain the information it needs, and art. 28 ATSG obliges you to supply, free of charge, all the information required to establish your claim. A line naming somebody who does not work at that company is not a risk worth taking — it is the one way an honest month of applications can end up worse off than no applications at all.

Nothing forces you to claim more than happened, either. «Still open» is a complete answer in the outcome column, even three months later. If you could not find a named contact, write the general address you sent it to and attach your copy. An incomplete but truthful entry is something you can discuss with your adviser; an invented one is not.

Why applying without an advert is the normal case here

The suspicion that a speculative application is a last resort does not survive contact with the structure of the Swiss market. On SwissJobs.app on 23 August 2026, 45.4 per cent of all employers with anything open had exactly one advert running, and another 34.3 per cent had two to five. The median employer shows two. At the other end, 5.4 per cent of employers had more than twenty adverts — and that small group accounts for 54.5 per cent of everything you see.

That is the real answer to the question behind the question. Applying only to what is advertised means spending most of your month inside the output of a handful of large advertisers. The great majority of employers surface for a few weeks with a single advert and are invisible the rest of the time, although they keep hiring throughout. Approaching them without an advert is not a way around the system; it is the only route into that part of the market.

One more figure from the same day belongs beside it: the single largest advertiser in the index is not an employer at all but a recruitment intermediary, and it accounts for roughly a tenth of everything open. That is why the SECO directive says plainly, at marginal note B315, that relying exclusively on a placement agency is not a sufficient personal job-search effort. Registering once and then waiting for that agency's adverts covers neither the breadth of the market nor the duty.

There is no fixed yardstick for the assessment in any case. Under marginal note B316 the competent office has a margin of discretion, and the type and number of efforts required depend on the labour market and on personal circumstances — age, education, geographic mobility, language barriers. In a narrow field with few vacancies advertised, the speculative application is not merely permitted; it is what your adviser expects to see.

When the office comes back to you

A follow-up question is not suspicion, it is the job: the competent office has to review job-search efforts every month (art. 26 para. 3 AVIV, marginal note B322). When a query lands on an entry with no advert behind it, it is almost always the same query — who did this go to, when, and in what form. That is what the copy in your file is for.

Refusing to answer without an excusable reason carries a real consequence: under art. 43 para. 3 ATSG the insurer may rule on the basis of the file as it stands, though it has to warn you in writing first and point out the consequences. If the efforts themselves are held insufficient, a suspension follows under art. 30 para. 1 let. c AVIG, its length set by the degree of fault and capped at sixty days per ground.

In practice most of this never happens. An entry with a name, a date, a channel and an attached copy answers the query before it is asked. So document the applications you made without an advert more fully than the rest, not less — they are the only ones where nobody but you has left a trace.

Two obligations, two grounds for suspension

Article 17 of the unemployment insurance act carries a two-part title: obligations of the insured person and monitoring rules. Paragraph 1 sets out the first — do everything that can reasonably be expected of you to avoid or shorten unemployment, look for work, if necessary outside your previous occupation, and be able to prove your efforts. Paragraph 2 sets out the second — register in person and comply with the federal monitoring rules from then on.

The SECO directive to the cantonal offices splits the same duties into two lists. Intensive applications during the notice period sit on the damage-prevention side. Intensive applications while drawing benefit, attendance at labour-market measures, counselling interviews and information events when instructed, and acceptance of suitable work sit on the damage-reduction side. Attendance stands next to the applications, not inside them.

The directive then spells out what the monitoring rules cover: appearing in person for the first interview, counselling and control interviews, monitoring data, and job-search efforts. Four items — and only the last one is what you file each month. That is the exact answer to the question people ask their adviser most often: no, the appointment you attended is not an effort. It is one of the other three duties.

Money makes the distinction visible. Article 30 paragraph 1 of the act gives each its own letter. Letter c catches an insured person who does not make sufficient personal efforts to find suitable work. Letter d catches one who fails to observe the monitoring rules or the instructions of the competent office, in particular by refusing suitable work or by not starting, or dropping out of, a labour-market measure without a valid reason. Two letters, two suspensions, and they can be imposed side by side.

The three types the form recognises

The federal proof-of-efforts form settles the definition better than any explanation. One column is headed for the application itself and offers three boxes: by letter or electronically, in person, by phone. Next to it sits a box to flag a vacancy assigned by the RAV, a field for the workload as full time or a part-time percentage, and the outcome — still open, interview, appointment, rejection, with the reason.

That tells you the minimum an effort has to be: contact with a company about a particular job, on a particular day, with a result you can put in writing. A call in which you ask about an advertised position and announce that your documents are on the way is an effort. A call in which you ask whether anyone is hiring at all will not fit the row, because the job-title field stays empty.

The English guidance on arbeit.swiss is unusually concrete about what each channel should leave behind. Keep emails and letters in a folder together with the replies. For phone calls and network contacts, note the date, the company and the person you spoke to — and follow the call up with an email attaching your CV. For a visit in person, ask for a business card or a company stamp. Each of those is the artefact that turns a conversation into a verifiable line.

The same guidance is equally clear about breadth: do not respond only to advertisements. Use your network, make speculative applications, call companies. Read together with the form, that is not a contradiction but a division of labour — the advert-based applications carry the month, the other channels widen it.

"For a specific vacancy" — where speculative applications sit

The federal guide for insured persons draws the line in one sentence: you must apply in a targeted way, as a rule in the form of an ordinary application, already before you become unemployed — and applications made where no concrete vacancy exists can serve only as a supplement.

Supplement is not the same as worthless. It means a month made up exclusively of speculative letters invites a question, and that a speculative application needs the same care as any other: an addressee, a reference to work the company actually does, a date. Several cantons put it in the same order — apply to open positions as a matter of course, use speculative applications to extend the reach.

How much reach that is depends entirely on your occupation, which is why the directive refuses to name a national number and ties both the type and the quantity of efforts to the labour market and to personal circumstances: age, education, geographical mobility, language barriers. In a narrow field with few advertisements, the speculative route is not a workaround. It is the only way to reach employers who are hiring without publishing.

Quality is judged alongside the count. The directive treats applications as insufficient where the letters are so superficial and rudimentary that they cannot be called serious, and it counts an unrealistic salary demand as a failure of the same duty. Neither test is about effort you felt; both are about what the file shows.

What does not count, even though it is work

The longest list is of activities that take an afternoon and produce no line at all. Rewriting your CV. Building a profile. Setting up search alerts. Reading adverts. Preparing for an interview. Each of them prepares an effort; none of them is one, because there is no addressee.

Registering with a recruitment agency is the borderline case, and the directive addresses it directly: registering is an effort, but relying on an agency alone is not a sufficient personal effort. After the registration, what counts again are applications for specific positions, including the agency's own vacancies. One registration plus a month of waiting is one line and no progress.

A course or a labour-market measure is not an effort either, even when it fills the month. The directive turns the expectation around: while you are on a measure you must still prove sufficient efforts unless you have been expressly released from doing so. The same applies to interim earnings from employed or self-employed work.

And a contact without a job is not proof. A coffee with a former colleague, a careers fair, a call about the state of the market may all be the beginning of an effort. They become one on the day they turn into an application for a particular role — and it is that date, not the date of the coffee, that belongs on the form.

When efforts keep running although you would expect a pause

As long as you claim benefit, you owe sufficient efforts. That covers the months in which you earn interim income, the weeks of a labour-market measure, and the period in which applications are pending. Waiting for three answers does not release you from making a fourth application, nor from accepting work outside your occupation if it is offered.

Having a job lined up for a future date does not release you either. The directive expects you to look for short-term work in the meantime. Only once suitable work is due to start within a month do the efforts stop being required, on the reasoning that they can no longer reduce the loss.

The cases where proof is waived altogether are listed exhaustively: the last two months before childbirth, the last six months before the reference age or before drawing an old-age pension early and permanently leaving the labour market, days exempt from monitoring, maternity, other-parent and care leave, incapacity for work through illness or accident, the planning phase of a permanent self-employed activity, a motivation semester, and certain integration measures.

That list carries a condition people miss. Being released from proving efforts does not release you from remaining willing to accept suitable work that is assigned to you — the only exceptions being days exempt from monitoring and the planning phase of self-employment. Afterwards the duty resumes, in a type and number that are, as always, for the cantonal office to judge.

What an application actually leaves behind in today's market

The form was designed for a time when an application was a letter to a person. The adverts open on SwissJobs.app on 23 August 2026 look different: every single one leads to a web page, and not one offers an email address to apply to. The market has stopped filling in the contact-person column for you.

The destinations split three ways. 43.7 percent of open adverts point to an address under the employer's own name, 35.4 percent go straight into a vendor's recruiting software, and 20.9 percent to a job platform or a staffing agency. Behind that sits a very long tail: 45.1 percent of all application destinations in the open stock appear exactly once.

The consequence for your proof is simple. Because the form still asks for what it asked for thirty years ago, you have to produce what a web form does not give you: the name of the person the application went to, taken from the advert or from a short call, and the acknowledgement the software sends back. That message carries the date, the company and usually a reference number, and it survives the advert once the role is filled.

This is the whole difference between an effort that counts and one that merely happened. Not the number of clicks decides it, but whether every row on the sheet has something behind it at the end of the month. File the acknowledgement the same day, write the row while the tab is still open, and the proof is finished long before the deadline on the fifth of the following month comes into view.

The RAV month, from search to evidence

The evidence is due at month end whether or not you kept notes. Recording an application as you send it means nothing has to be reconstructed on the 28th — and it is that reconstruction which produces the unsuitable applications recruiters notice.

The two official places, and what separates them

The first is the eService listed on arbeit.swiss as "Efforts to find work", inside Job-Room, the official platform of Swiss unemployment insurance. It sits alongside "Incapacity to work" and "Documents for jobseeking" as an eService of the RAV. The unemployment fund's own eServices — the benefit application and the monthly "Details of the insured person" — are a separate stack going to a separate recipient, and that distinction matters more than it looks.

The Basel-Stadt user guide describes the recording itself in four moves: open the efforts section, click record, enter the details, save. Clicking a month shows everything already entered. Two properties are the real reason to choose this route. Entries "are automatically transmitted to your RAV overnight on the 5th to the 6th of the month", and you "can export a current compilation of all efforts for a month as a PDF at any time, for example as a basis for counselling interviews or for your own records". The transmission happens without you, and your own copy is one click.

The second place is paper. The form is published on arbeit.swiss as a PDF, carries the line "to be submitted to the RAV by the 5th day of the following month at the latest", and ends with three things the portal has no equivalent for: a date, a line for enclosures, and the signature of the insured person.

The difference between the two is not the content. It is the delivery. In the eService the system delivers, and leaves the trace. On paper you deliver — and you have to create the trace yourself.

Four routes into the office

The canton of Zurich sets them out one by one. Online: "If you record your efforts online in the eServices of arbeit.swiss, you do not need to do anything further." By email, sending the completed form to your RAV counsellor. By post, addressed to that counsellor at the RAV. Or handed in personally at the office.

Zurich adds a rule that sounds like housekeeping and is not: do not send photographs of the form. Either fill it in electronically or complete it by hand and scan it. A photographed sheet can be treated as not submitted — and then a month of genuine applications simply does not count.

In Geneva the same operation runs under the ORP eServices, and the cantonal page frames it explicitly as the end of the postal route: no more sending them to the cantonal employment office, because "your ORP counsellor receives them automatically by the 5th of the following month at the latest". In the same breath Geneva warns against using the ORP's document upload for papers that belong to the unemployment fund. Two recipients, two letterboxes, and mail in the wrong one does not find its way to the right one.

That the four routes coexist for a reason became obvious when the federal eServices went down for weeks over one new year. The Vaud authority wrote the fallback out in advance: anyone who had not recorded the agreed number of applications before the shutdown could still send them by email, by post, or by dropping them directly into the ORP's letterbox. And to the question of whether the outage pushed the deadline back, the answer was one word: no, the deadline would be missed. A portal that is unavailable does not move the fifth day.

The deadline is about arrival, not dispatch

Article 26 paragraph 2 of the unemployment insurance ordinance requires the proof to be submitted "for each control period at the latest on the fifth day of the following month or on the first working day thereafter", and article 27a defines the control period as every calendar month. Let the deadline pass without a valid excuse and the efforts "are no longer taken into consideration".

How literally that is meant was shown in a Geneva case decided in Lausanne. The insured person had posted the form by ordinary mail on the 26th of the month, as she did every month, and produced a copy of it when she objected to the sanction. The cantonal court found she had not been able to prove that she had submitted it within the legal deadline, upheld the sanction in principle, but cut it from five days to two: it was a first lapse, and neither the quality nor the number of her applications was in dispute. The Federal Supreme Court restored the five days. Five is the minimum on the SECO scale for this kind of case, the circumstances showed nothing unusual, and the cantonal judges had substituted their own assessment for the administration's without a relevant reason. Five suspension days, plus court costs, for a letter that may well have arrived.

The same judgment restates the principle from the published case law that many people read too late: the law grants no additional grace period, and producing the evidence afterwards — in objection proceedings, for instance — does not repair the lapse. The frame for the sanction itself comes from article 45 paragraph 3 of the ordinance, one to fifteen days for a light fault, with the SECO scale putting five to nine days on a control period with no recorded efforts.

In practice: the eService creates the arrival itself and needs no proof of it. If you stay on paper, manufacture the arrival rather than hoping for it. An email sits in your sent folder and can be acknowledged with one line of reply. A counter gives a receipt. Registered post gives a delivery record. Ordinary mail gives none of the three.

Before you have an account: where the first efforts go

The duty to apply is older than any login. The note printed on the federal form says so plainly: the obligation to look for work personally applies already before unemployment begins — during the notice period, for example, or during a fixed-term contract.

But the eService needs an account, and arbeit.swiss puts the steps in a fixed order: first you sign on with the RAV, then you register for Job-Room, after the RAV has completed your registration. Geneva adds what you need in hand for that: the personal number issued at registration, printed on your ORP registration confirmation or on the monthly form for the insured person's details.

So there is a stretch of weeks — from your first application during the notice period to your first login — with no official place at all. Those efforts are recorded wherever you decide: a list, a spreadsheet, the printed form. They are handed over at the first interview. Ticino states the requirement in exactly those terms in its general guidance on registering: proof of job-search efforts must be presented to the office both at the start of unemployment and in every further control month. It also gives the reason anyone keeps a second set of books, and it is the same reason the form gives: keep copies of the applications sent and the replies received.

The form's own note puts it as an obligation, not advice — written records such as copies of applications or rejection letters are to be kept and submitted on request. The proof is the line in the portal or on the sheet. The evidence behind it stays with you until somebody asks.

Why a private record alongside is not duplicated work

Up to thirty-five days can separate the day you apply from the day the proof is due. Apply on the first of January and you write it up on the fifth of February. Everything that is obvious on the day — the exact company name, the person you addressed, whether the post was full-time or part-time — has to be reconstructed by then.

Reconstruction would be easy if applications collected anywhere. They do not. Counted across the adverts open on SwissJobs.app, the single most common destination of an apply link carries 10.6 per cent of them; the ten most common together cover 32.0 per cent, the fifty most common 50.7 per cent, and even the hundred most common reach only 60.3 per cent. The remainder scatters across more than two thousand further destinations. There is no inbox holding this month's twelve applications. There are twelve separate systems, several of which will never write to you at all.

There is also a trap in the simplest field of all, the company name. Of the open adverts, 11.6 per cent are placed under the name of a recruiter or a staffing agency rather than the employer's own. Record what actually happened: the application went to the intermediary, and that is how it belongs on the proof. A line naming an employer you never approached directly is worse, if it is checked, than an honest one.

One more thing that costs time at month end: the adverts are not all written in the language of your form. In the open stock 41.6 per cent are in German, 20.2 per cent in English, 9.7 per cent in French and 1.6 per cent in Italian, with roughly a quarter carrying no clearly identifiable language. The form exists in German, French and Italian. Copy the job title exactly as the advert had it — then it matches what the office would find if it looked the vacancy up itself.

A monthly rhythm in which the fifth is never tight

Record on the day you apply, not at month end. An entry in the eService takes a minute, and for a vacancy you found inside Job-Room it takes less: the transfer button on the advert moves it straight into your efforts.

On the last day of the month, go through it once against your own list. If an application is missing, that is the moment to add it — not the fifth. Then pull the month's PDF export and file it. It costs nothing, and at the counselling interview it is the one document both of you are looking at.

Submit on the first or second working day of the new month, not the fifth. The deadline does move to the next working day when the fifth falls on a weekend or a public holiday — Ticino spells that out — but anyone who plans around that buffer no longer has it when the portal is down or the email bounces.

And keep the evidence in one folder, physical or digital: applications, acknowledgements, rejections. It is rarely requested. When it is requested, it is the difference between a follow-up question and a formal decision.

First: the form you will be filling in is not in English

The proof-of-job-search sheet is published by SECO in three editions — German, French and Italian — and the English-language section of arbeit.swiss links straight to the German one. If you are working in English in Switzerland, this is the moment the language question stops being theoretical: the boxes you have to fill in are labelled Firma, Stellenbezeichnung, Pensum and Ergebnis, or entreprise, description du poste, activité and résultat, or ditta, impiego in qualità di, occupazione and risultato.

That matters for one practical reason. The labels are not interchangeable with the words a British or American job search uses. "Pensum" is not seniority, it is the percentage of a full week you are applying for. "Zuweisung RAV" is not a referral in the networking sense, it is a vacancy your counsellor formally assigned to you. And the Italian sheet asks the job-title question as a sentence — "impiego in qualità di?", employed in the capacity of? — which is a better description of what belongs there than the word "title".

Nothing stops you writing the content in English. Job titles in particular should stay exactly as the employer advertised them, and in our index that is often English anyway: among the open adverts whose language could be determined, 27.2 per cent were written in English, second only to German at 56.1 per cent, ahead of French at 13.1 and Italian at 2.2 per cent.

The header: three details that decide which month a row belongs to

Three fields sit above the table: name, AHV number, and month and year. The AHV number is the identifier your regional employment centre and your unemployment fund both file you under, and it is the reason a sheet is never anonymous.

Because the month is stated once at the top, the date column in every row asks only for a day and a month. No row carries a year. The sheet is bound to a single control period by design — Geneva goes a step further and posts a personal copy each month, valid only for the month printed in the top right corner, with the downloadable version offered as a supplement.

The top-left box, "date of receipt / postmark", is not yours. The office stamps the arrival date there, which is what makes a proof sheet impossible to backdate, and the sheet itself carries the instruction to hand it in by the fifth day of the following month at the latest.

There is room for fourteen applications — eight rows on page one, six on page two. That is a printing decision, not a target; a second sheet is entirely normal.

One box, four details: company, address, contact, phone

The second column carries a two-line heading, "company, address" above "contact person, phone number", and a single input box underneath. Four details compete for one line of space, which is why in practice this column shrinks to a company name and nothing else.

That is the most expensive shortcut on the sheet, because the address is what makes two rows distinguishable. Of the adverts open in our index on 22 August 2026, 73.0 per cent came from employers advertising in at least two different places at the same time, and 50.1 per cent from employers with vacancies in five or more places. In 14.4 per cent of cases, the same employer was running the same job title in more than one location simultaneously.

For that last group, the address is the only thing separating your application in Basel from your application in Bern. Write the company name alone and the two rows are identical on paper — and three months later you will not be able to say which was which.

The market gives you the address half: 98.4 per cent of open adverts name an actual municipality rather than a region or simply "Switzerland". It does not give you the person. Our index holds no contact name or phone number for any open advert, so that box comes from the advert body, the imprint page, a short phone call, or the acknowledgement email that arrives after you submit.

Job title: the function, trimmed of everything else

The box asks for the job title, and the advert headline is usually not it. Of the adverts open on 22 August 2026, 54.9 per cent carried something in the headline that does not belong in the box: a gender tag in brackets (31.6 per cent), brackets of any kind (45.8 per cent), or a percentage (22.0 per cent).

Space enforces the same discipline. The median advert title in our index runs to forty characters, 18.3 per cent exceed sixty, and the longest one per cent run past a hundred. Handwritten, that does not fit. What fits is the function as the employer names it — Quality Engineer, Sachbearbeiterin Debitoren, Pflegefachfrau HF — with the decoration left out.

Do not translate it, though. If the advert said "Senior Data Engineer", the row says Senior Data Engineer. The point of the box is that the wording in your row, the wording in the advert and the wording in the employer’s acknowledgement email are the same three words, so that anyone checking can line them up.

Workload: the box the market rarely fills in for you

The workload column offers two moves: tick full-time, or write a part-time percentage. It is therefore the field most likely to hold a number that appears in no document. Only 22.0 per cent of open adverts stated a percentage in the title at all.

And a stated figure is often a range rather than a number: 12.7 per cent of open adverts advertise a band such as 80–100 per cent, against 6.7 per cent that ask explicitly for a hundred. A band is not something you copy — it is a question addressed to you. What belongs in the row is the workload you actually applied for, and the same figure should appear in your covering letter.

This is not pedantry. The workload column is where your applications are compared with the availability you declared when you registered. Declaring full-time availability and then filing a month of sixty-per-cent applications is not a bad row, it is a search strategy that needs explaining — and it is better explained by you, at the next appointment, than discovered.

Three ticks for how, four for what happened

Between the job title and the outcome sits a narrow column for RAV assignment. It gets a tick only when your counsellor formally assigned you the vacancy. Left blank, it means you found the job yourself, which is the ordinary case and costs you nothing.

The channel is ticked, not described: by letter or electronically, in person, by telephone. An application through an employer’s web form is the electronic option, even though no letter and no email is created. A phone call belongs in the telephone box only if the call was the application, not if it was preparation for one.

The outcome offers four boxes — still open, interview, appointment, rejection — and only the last has a text field beside it for the reason. Write what you were actually told: filled internally, profile not a match, no reply received. Short is fine; invented is not.

There is no column for later corrections, and that is deliberate. Your row describes the position on the day you signed. A rejection that arrives in September for an August application goes into your own list and into the conversation at your next appointment, not back onto a sheet already handed in.

Enclosures, signature, and the paragraph beside them

Below the table sit three things: a field for enclosures, a date, and the insured person’s signature. The enclosures field names the papers you are handing over with the sheet, and it is the visible end of a duty written into the form itself — written records such as copies of applications and rejection letters must be kept and produced on request.

So the proof is built in two layers. The sheet is the declaration: eight details per row, signed. Your folder is the evidence, and it only becomes visible if someone asks. Only the first layer is handed in each month, which is exactly why the second has to be filed on the day rather than assembled at the end.

Cantons do care how the first layer arrives. Zurich states it plainly: do not send photographs of the form, send either the electronically completed version or a scan of the handwritten one. A tilted photo with unreadable phone numbers is not a formality — it destroys the very details the sheet exists to carry.

Beside the signature stands the sentence that gives the whole document its weight: a person who provides untrue or incomplete information is liable to prosecution. That is why a blank box always beats an invented one. If you never found a name, write the general address you sent to and enclose the copy.

The same eight details, entered online

Recording your efforts through the eServices replaces the grid with a form on screen, but the details requested are the same eight. The one genuine advantage is transfer: a vacancy found on the public job platform can be carried into the entry instead of retyped, which removes typing errors from precisely the two fields — employer and title — that later carry recognition.

What the online route cannot do is supply the four details that were never in the advert: the date you applied, the person you applied to, the workload you applied for, and the outcome. The screen saves typing, not observing.

Because both routes ask for the same things, it pays to keep your own list in the same eight columns regardless of how you submit. It is also the only version that stays with you once the unemployment period ends.

What to capture on the day

Five details are reliably available only on the day you apply: the date, the employer together with the address of the site you applied to, the person and their number if you have one, the job title in the advert’s own spelling, and the workload you applied for. Two arrive later — the outcome and, if it is a rejection, the reason.

Three small habits secure the evidence layer at the same time: keep the acknowledgement email instead of deleting it, save the advert as a PDF before it disappears once the post is filled, and take the contact name from the acknowledgement when the advert named nobody. Those emails almost always carry a date, the company and a reference number.

The cost is about a minute per application. The alternative is a quarter of an hour of reconstruction per row on the fifth of the following month, with the familiar result: company names without addresses, guessed dates, and a contact column left empty because the name can no longer be found.

What the form actually asks for

The federal form is a grid, and one call fills one row of it — the same row a written application would fill, with the same date, company, job title, workload and outcome. Two of its columns behave differently when the effort was a call, and they are the two worth thinking about before you dial: the box that records the channel, and the field that records the person.

The channel box makes the call official: by telephone stands beside by letter or electronically and in person, so a call is one of three recognised routes rather than an improvisation. The contact column, on the other hand, stops being optional. A written application can lean on the copy of the letter you filed; a call cannot. The name, the number and the date are the whole record.

That also settles a question people ask their caseworker every month: if you rang first and sent the dossier afterwards, that is one effort for one vacancy and one row. Tick the channel that was the application itself — the conversation, or the dispatch. Two rows for a single approach are not two efforts, and recording the call as the application when a full dossier went out the same day throws away the stronger piece of evidence.

The instruction printed at the foot of the form makes that gap visible: written documents such as copies of application letters or rejection letters are to be kept and submitted on request. A call generates none of them by itself. Whether your row is backed by anything at all therefore depends on what you do in the hour after you hang up.

One practical note for anyone applying in Switzerland from abroad or in English: the form is published in German, French and Italian, and the copy you hand in is the one your RAV works with. The conversation can be in any language. The entry has to be legible to the person checking it.

The line the Federal Court drew

The governing decision is short and unglamorous. An insured man had tried four times in one month to reach a particular contact by phone, never got through, and wanted those attempts counted among his efforts. The court refused. If a possible employer cannot be reached by telephone, it held, a written application has to follow, or the job seeker calls at the business in person. And then the sentence that settles the whole question: in so far as no contact with a possible employer came about, one cannot speak of a job-search effort (C 275/2005 of 6 November 2006, E. 3.2).

So the attempt is not the effort. The attempt is the start of something that becomes an effort either through the conversation itself or through the written application that follows it. Three unanswered calls and nothing in writing leave you with nothing to show for that employer, however real the time spent.

The second boundary concerns what the call is for. In 2020 the Zurich social insurance court considered a man who, alongside his applications, had telephoned former business partners and suppliers to let them know he was looking. Networking, the court said, is a sensible and recommendable step, but from the point of view of unemployment insurance law it does not constitute a sufficient job-search effort, because the insured person has to seek work in a targeted way, as a rule in the form of an ordinary application for an open position.

Put the two together and the test is easy to apply. A call counts when you reached a named person about a named vacancy. It does not count as relationship-building, and it does not count as an attempt. That calls are simply how some industries hire is not in dispute: cantonal guidance says in as many words that, depending on the sector, personal or telephone approaches are permissible and sensible. Permissible as a form — not as a shortcut around the substance.

Why your own note is the weakest kind of proof

The value of a phone record is easiest to judge from how the administration treats its own. SECO guidance on evidence says that information on essential points is to be obtained in writing, and that information obtained by telephone and recorded in a file note is an admissible and suitable means of proof only in so far as it establishes secondary points.

That is a general principle of Swiss social insurance law rather than a rule invented for job seekers. Article 43 paragraph 1 of the General Part of Social Insurance Law obliges the insurer to make the necessary enquiries of its own accord and closes with the sentence that information given orally must be recorded in writing. What was spoken has to be written down — and even then it does not carry the main point on its own.

The consequence for your row is not that the call is worthless. It is that the call needs a companion document, and that the cheapest one is an email sent the same afternoon: a line thanking the person for their time, a sentence naming the position discussed, and the dossier attached. That single message converts a private memory into an exchange with two parties, a timestamp and a subject line.

The standard of proof matters here too. For a suspension of benefits the facts have to be established at the level of preponderant probability, and the same guidance states plainly that there is no general legal principle requiring the administration or the court to decide in favour of the insured person in case of doubt. Doubt about your telephone entry does not resolve itself in your favour.

Four things to write down before you do anything else

Who. First name and surname, spelled out — asking someone to spell their name is the least popular question in Switzerland and the one that saves the entry — plus their role and the direct number on which you reached them. A misspelled name is a row nobody can check.

What. The job title exactly as the advert gave it, and the workload. Both have their own columns on the form, and both are obvious thirty seconds after the call and gone three weeks later.

What you were told. Still open, already filled, interviews under way, send the dossier to this address: that answer is the content of the outcome column. "Still open" is a perfectly good outcome, and so is a rejection with its reason. Nothing in that column may be invented — the notes printed on the form warn that an insured person who gives false or incomplete information is liable to prosecution (Art. 105 ff. AVIG).

What you promised. Where the person asks to see your dossier first, SECO's own application brochure advises being co-operative, saying you will send it within the next few days, referring to the phone conversation in the covering letter, and addressing that letter to the person you spoke to. Follow the advice and the letter becomes the written evidence for the telephone row — which is why the two belong together in the same file.

Then keep it. Cantonal guidance sets a retention period the federal form leaves out: application letters, rejections, email correspondence and other documents are to be kept for at least six months and produced on request. The same sheet notes that caseworkers may, in spot checks or where there is suspicion, obtain information about job-search efforts directly from employers. Your telephone row can be checked at the other end.

The call that is not an effort but improves every entry after it

There is a second kind of call that has no place on the form and still does more for the quality of your record than anything else: the one you make to find out who the application should be addressed to. SECO recommends it for unsolicited applications in plain terms — ring the company, ask for the name and address of the person responsible for personnel, because an application addressed to a named person always lands better than a generic one.

That call is not its own row, because it does not target a specific vacancy. What it does is fill in the contact-person column of the written application that follows — the column that stays empty on most proofs of effort.

How often the detour is needed can be read off the application route itself. Across the adverts open on SwissJobs.app on 23 August 2026, 57.6 per cent sent the applicant to a web address carrying the employer's own name; for the remaining 42.4 per cent it did not, because the application runs into a third party's portal. In that second group there is frequently nobody at the end of the click who could be named at all, and the switchboard is the only route to a person.

If the switchboard will not give you a name — which happens — record that as it was: general number, date, no contact person given. An incomplete but truthful entry can be discussed with your caseworker. An invented one cannot.

When a call is worth making, measured on live adverts

The most common question on these calls is not "will you hire me" but "is this still open". It is a fairer question than it sounds. Across the stock open on SwissJobs.app on 23 August 2026, the median open advert was twenty days old. Only 13.2 per cent were less than a week old, 45.6 per cent were between seven and thirty days, 12.9 per cent between thirty-one and sixty days, and 28.2 per cent were older than two months.

So in more than four cases out of ten you are calling about a posting that has been visible for over a month. What you learn in that minute appears in no advert: whether the search is still running, whether interviews have started, whether a second site is filling the same role. That answer belongs in the outcome column, and it is the reason a documented call often tells your caseworker more than a twelfth standard application.

For timing, a second pattern from the same stock helps. 90.4 per cent of open adverts appeared on a working day, with a peak on Wednesday at 22.0 per cent and 56.3 per cent falling between Monday and Wednesday; 9.6 per cent appeared at the weekend. Calling in the days right after an advert goes up puts you in front of a vacancy nobody has worked through yet.

None of that replaces volume. Cantonal guidance in Schaffhausen treats ten to twelve efforts a month as the normal case and requires fewer than ten to be specially agreed and justified. Whether the efforts actually succeed is, in the words of SECO guidance, not what matters; how many there are, and how well documented they are, is.

Recording it, and the deadline that applies to calls as well

In the "job-search efforts" e-service on job-room.ch a call is entered like any other effort, using the same fields as the paper form. On paper you fill in the same row by hand. The deadline is identical either way: the proof for a calendar month has to be submitted by the fifth day of the following month, or the first working day after it.

For the electronic route the decisive date is expressly the date on which you saved the entry, not the date of transmission — the month's efforts are forwarded automatically at midnight on the sixth. Save on the fifth and you are in time; save on the sixth and you are not, where the fifth was a working day. For post, the date of handing the item over at the post office counts.

Which is the practical argument for entering the call on the day it happened rather than at month end. The reason is not the deadline but the content: a name, a direct number and the precise wording of an answer are perishable. What you reconstruct five weeks later may well be accurate, but it is no longer verifiable in the sense the guidance means.

Four situations that look exactly the same from outside

An advert that is no longer there can mean four different things, and they are indistinguishable from the street. One: the role really has been filled or cancelled. Two: the publication window simply ended — many applicant systems publish with a fixed end date, and that date has nothing to do with the state of the shortlist. Three: the role is open but no longer at that address, because the company changed applicant system, rebuilt its careers site, or let a paid listing lapse. Four: nothing is wrong at all and you landed on an intermediate page that forwarded your browser somewhere else.

Telling those four apart is not a theoretical exercise. In the first case the matter is closed; in the second and third it is emphatically not; in the fourth you merely have the wrong address. Anyone who treats all four the same and writes the job off loses applications that were still available.

Only one party knows which of the four applies, and it works at the company. So "what if the advert goes offline" is really a question about order of operations: do not interpret, ask — and ask the employer, not the search engine.

What actually happens when you go back and look

We measured this on 23 August 2026 rather than guessing at it. From our own live listings we drew 128 adverts — four age groups of 32, from "published within the last seven days" to "three to four months old", never more than one advert per employer — and re-opened the source of every single one.

The result runs against intuition. In 68.8 per cent of cases the exact job title was still in the text of the page. In 26.6 per cent the page loaded normally but no longer named the role. 3.1 per cent could not be reached at all. And error pages? 1.6 per cent — one advert out of 128 answered with the classic 404.

What was absent is more striking still. Not one of the 128 pages contained a sentence that explained the disappearance. We tested for more than thirty formulations across all four national languages — "no longer available", "position has been filled", "cette offre n’est plus disponible", "offerta è scaduta" and others. Hits: zero. When a vacancy goes, it goes silently.

Then there is redirection: roughly three in ten addresses ended on a different path from the one we requested. This is where the common misreading is born. You click a saved link, a tidy careers page opens showing other jobs, and you read that as "gone". All you have actually seen is that somebody configured a forward.

One honest caveat about the method. Even among the newest adverts, nearly all of which must still be open, the title check failed in about a fifth of cases — on pages that assemble their content in the browser, our test cannot find the title at all. The meaningful part is therefore not any single percentage but the comparison: in the oldest group a good third of pages no longer named the role, in the youngest a good fifth. And the finding that matters here does not depend on the method at all: there were almost no error pages, and no plain-language explanation anywhere.

You have already applied: nothing changes

This is the most common case and the least troubling one. A submitted application is a transaction between you and the employer; the advert was only the invitation to it. When the invitation is withdrawn from the wall, the transaction survives — including the acknowledgement e-mail, the period in which they answer, and the possibility of an interview invitation two weeks from now.

The same holds for your proof of job-search efforts. Margin note B321 of the SECO directive requires written information about your efforts for each control period, and requires that what you submit be verifiable. What is verifiable is what you did: the date, the company, the position, the channel, the person. Whether the employer still has the listing online today is not part of it and is never asked for. So do not rewrite an entry, and do not delete a line, because a link now leads nowhere.

In the outcome column you record the actual state of play. "Still open" remains correct for as long as nobody has rejected you — an advert disappearing is not a rejection and must not be entered as one. If a rejection arrives later, you correct the field then, not in advance.

One duty does not change, though. Margin note B317 states plainly that an insured person waiting for an answer to an application is not thereby released from their obligations: the search continues. When an advert vanishes and the reply never comes, it is tempting to treat the month as "still running". The control period runs regardless, and it counts efforts, not hopes.

You have not applied yet: the question that is worth asking

This is where the real loss sits. An advert you saw and never answered is not a job-search effort — it is one line fewer in your record, for a position that may well still exist. A vacancy that has gone off the wall is not a reason to drop the contact; it is the reason to make it short.

The message that works is two sentences long and carries four pieces of information: the exact job title, the location, the date on which you saw the listing, and the question of whether the position is still open. Those are precisely the four things the person at the other end needs in order to look it up. "I saw that you had a vacancy" does not get anybody into a system.

If the employer says the role is open, you apply as normal and record the application. If they say it is filled, you have a sourced answer and can note it in your own file — it explains later why no application followed. If nobody answers at all, it stays a question without a result, and the right consequence is another application in the same month rather than a debate about whether the call counts.

What you send afterwards still has to be worth reading. Margin note B315 calls applications insufficient where the letters are drafted so superficially and rudimentarily that they cannot be described as serious applications. A hurried application written only to fill a line on the form does not solve the problem; it postpones it.

The habit that makes the problem disappear

The advert is the only part of your application file that lives on somebody else’s server. Everything else is yours: your letter, your CV, the acknowledgement, your note from the phone call. The listing alone can be deleted by a stranger without asking you — and it is exactly the thing you need weeks later, when you prepare for the interview and want to know what was actually asked for.

So the habit is a single one: save the text of the advert on the day you apply. Printed to PDF, pasted into your application document, or in the worst case a screenshot. With it, the four details that also belong in your record — title, company, location, date — and the listing reference number if there is one. It costs a minute and is the only insurance against an advert that is gone three days later.

That copy pays for itself in three places. At the interview, because you have the stated duties in front of you word for word while your counterpart is speaking from memory. In your proof of efforts, because you can support your entry without depending on someone else’s website. And in the follow-up itself, because a reference number from a vanished listing finds the role in the employer’s system immediately.

When the RAV assigned you the vacancy

An assignment changes the situation, because behind the vacancy stands an instruction from the competent authority. Under Art. 30 para. 1 let. d AVIG, benefits are suspended for a person who fails to follow instructions or does not accept suitable work. An advert that has since gone offline is therefore not a reason to let the assignment quietly lapse — it is the reason to tell the RAV the same day.

That is not bureaucracy for its own sake; it is the procedure as designed. Margin note B305 of the SECO directive states that where an insured person has been instructed to present themselves to a particular employer and no engagement results, the competent authority has a duty to establish the reasons for the non-engagement, and the employer is obliged to provide information under Art. 28 ATSG. The clarification you cannot carry out yourself is the office’s job in any case.

In practice: apply if any address still works — by e-mail to the contact named in the assignment letter, advert or no advert. If that is impossible, report to your counsellor what you tried, with the date and time. An assignment left unanswered in an inbox looks like a refusal in the file; an assignment with a report back looks like what it was.

How fast the market turns — and why the same role comes back

Adverts disappearing is not an anomaly; it is the base speed of this market. In our live listings on 23 August 2026, half of all adverts had been published within the previous three weeks and 13.2 per cent within the previous seven days. At the other end sits a stubborn tail: 28.3 per cent were more than two months old and 16.6 per cent more than three. Anyone wondering whether an advert is "too old" to answer can read the reply here — a substantial share of what is online has been online for a long time, and evidently for a reason.

Then there is repetition. About 3.1 per cent of all employer-and-title combinations appeared more than once in our listings, with more than three weeks between the earliest and the latest posting; the median gap was 54 days. Counted in adverts that is 10.3 per cent — one open advert in ten belongs to a role the same employer has advertised more than once.

That is the best reason not to read a vanished listing as final. Roles get re-cut, selection processes fail, permits arrive late, and the same position resurfaces a few weeks later, often under a slightly different title. If you noted the employer and the exact wording of the title, you will recognise it. If you only saved the link, you will not.

For the search itself this produces one concrete rule: companies whose advert you missed belong on a list of their own, not in the bin. A role that has been advertised once is evidence of a need that genuinely exists inside that company. Most starting points for an application cannot claim as much.

The second place the same vacancy can sit

For part of the market there is a second, official address. Since 1 January 2020 employers have been legally obliged to report vacancies to the RAV in occupations with a nationwide unemployment rate of at least five per cent. Reporting runs through the public employment service platform or directly via the RAV — and that is where the vacancy appears first.

SECO describes the sequence like this: a vacancy may only be advertised elsewhere five working days after publication in the online job portal accessible solely to jobseekers registered with the RAV. For you, as a registered jobseeker, that has two consequences. First, you see these vacancies there earlier than anywhere else. Second, the restricted area is a second place where a role can still be listed whose public advert you can no longer find.

The reverse holds just as firmly: the restricted area covers only the reportable occupations, not the whole market. An advert that is absent from it again says nothing about the vacancy. Here too the reliable route is the same as in every other case — the question to the company, with the title and the date.