Tracking and proving job applications for the RAV

How to judge an application tool for Switzerland

Instead of a ranking that is wrong next week: the points on which a tool succeeds or fails for the Swiss market. Use them on us too.

The official form is the specification

Anyone searching for "the best tracker" is really searching for a field list, and that list already exists. It is printed on the SECO form "Proof of personal job search efforts", published in German, French and Italian. The header asks for your name, your AHV number and the month and year of the control period. Below it sits a table of fourteen rows, and every row carries the same columns.

Those columns are: the date of the application with day and month; company and address; contact person and telephone number; the job title; a box for an assignment made by the RAV; the workload applied for, full-time or part-time with a percentage; how the application was made, with the options in writing or electronically, in person, and by telephone; the outcome, with the options still open, interview, hired and rejected; and the reason for the rejection.

At the foot come the date, the signature of the insured person, and a field for enclosures. That last field is not decoration. The same sheet states that written documents such as copies of application letters or rejection letters have to be kept and submitted on request.

That gives you the test to apply to any tool. Can I record the nine details in it, and can I attach the evidence? Everything else — colour schemes, reminders, statistics — is comfort, and comfort is worthless if a column is empty on the fifth of the month.

Two channels count, and both share one deadline

Under the RAV eServices in Job-Room, arbeit.swiss lists exactly three services: job search efforts, incapacity to work, and documents for jobseeking. The first of those is the electronic proof. Getting to it takes two steps: first sign on with the public employment service through the dedicated eService, then register for Job-Room and open a user account.

The second channel is the form. arbeit.swiss spells out the procedure: download the PDF and save it locally, open it in Acrobat Reader rather than in the browser, complete it on the computer — explicitly important, because the unemployment fund scans the sheet with character recognition — then print it, sign it and send it in with the other supporting documents. Download a fresh copy for each submission.

The deadline is identical for both. Article 26 paragraph 2 of the unemployment insurance ordinance requires the proof for each control period by the fifth day of the following month at the latest, or the first working day after that date; if the insured person lets the deadline pass without a valid excuse, the efforts are no longer taken into consideration. Paragraph 3 adds that the competent office reviews the efforts every month.

Behind that sits article 17 paragraph 1 of the unemployment insurance act: the insured person must look for work, if necessary outside their previous occupation, and must be able to prove those efforts. The form adds that the duty applies before unemployment even begins — during the notice period, for example, or a fixed-term contract. Start tracking on the day you receive notice and you will never have to reconstruct a month.

Why company and role are too thin a record

The most common home-made tracker has two columns: employer and job. That is enough as a memory aid and not enough as proof, and the live market shows why. Of the adverts open on SwissJobs.app on 22 August 2026, 93.2 per cent came from an employer who had at least one further advert open at the same moment, and 81 per cent from an employer with at least five. "I applied to X" therefore rarely identifies a vacancy.

The job title does not close the gap either. For 21.1 per cent of open adverts, the same employer had the identical title posted more than once — different sites, different workloads, one line in your spreadsheet. And 8.8 per cent carried a title that a different employer was using at the same time.

What does close the gap is the address of the advert. Of the application links in the index, 72.6 per cent contain a reference number of at least four digits, and that number is exactly what separates the second branch from the first. Copying it costs one right-click on the day you apply, and saves twenty minutes of archaeology at the end of the month.

One more column is trickier than it looks: the workload. Only 22 per cent of open adverts state a percentage in the job title. For the rest it sits in the body text — and the body text is precisely what disappears when the advert comes down.

The fields you cannot reconstruct later

Three columns of the proof are close to unfillable after the fact. The contact person and phone number exist in the advert or in a confirmation email and nowhere else. The workload sits in the advert text. And a reason for rejection only exists for as long as you keep the rejection.

On top of that comes the gap the deadline itself creates. Send an application on the first of the month and you will file it, at the earliest, on the fifth of the next — up to thirty-five days later. The market visibly moves in that window: the median open advert is around nineteen days old, and only a good third are older than thirty-five days. The stock is being replaced faster than the interval between applying and filing.

The practical consequence is mundane and still widely ignored: save the advert as a PDF on the day you apply and keep it with the row. It is the same document the form already tells you to retain and produce on request.

A tracker with nowhere to put such files is therefore only half a tracker. It records that you applied, but not what you applied to.

Spreadsheet, paper or app — the honest comparison

A spreadsheet is a legitimate tool. It costs nothing, it takes five minutes to set up with the nine columns, and it works offline. Its two weaknesses are familiar: every row is typed by hand, and an attachment can only be hinted at as a file path that nobody will find in three months.

Using the paper form itself as the tracker is the most conservative option, and it works surprisingly well because it forces the right order: you fill in the row when the application goes out, not at the end of the month. Fourteen rows per sheet cover most control periods. The drawback is duplication if you file electronically anyway.

Job-Room is the only channel where recording and filing are the same act, which is its structural advantage over any private tool: enter it there and there is no transfer left to do. As a day-to-day working surface many find it narrow, because it does not think about applications beyond the proof.

An app is worth it precisely when it shortens that transfer: when date, company, role and link are already in place the moment you apply, and when you can add contact person, workload and outcome in the same view. Without that, it is a prettier spreadsheet.

What SwissJobs.app does, and what it does not

Our tracker is the working document, not the proof. Because it lives inside the same job search, every job you save arrives with the employer, the job title, the location, the link to the advert and the date attached; alongside them sit the date you applied, a field for contact details, and a view of how long an application has been waiting without an answer. It is included with an account and costs nothing.

That fills four of the nine columns without typing and prepares a fifth. By hand you add what only you know: whether the RAV assigned the vacancy, the workload you applied for, the route you used, and — once it arrives — the reason for the rejection.

What the tracker explicitly does not do is transmit anything to your RAV. The filing stays with the Job-Room eService or the signed form, and the deadline stays the fifth day of the following month. Confuse the two and you end up with a beautifully maintained overview and no efforts on record.

The best tracker for the RAV, then, is not a product but a habit with a tool that fits it: nine fields filled in on the day you apply, the saved advert next to them, and one transfer a month before the deadline runs.

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 official free channel, and what it will not do

Start with the one that is free by design. Job-Room is the platform of the Swiss public employment service, and its eServices for jobseekers include the record of job-search efforts. Anyone who prefers paper gets the SECO form from their RAV instead. Neither costs a franc.

That channel does exactly one job: it takes what you claim for the control period and passes it on. The ordinance is explicit that the competent office checks those efforts every month, so this is where the assessment actually happens.

What it does not do matters just as much. It will not remind you to follow up after ten days. It has no state between applied and rejected. It knows nothing about the interview pencilled in for next Tuesday. Every tracker on the market, free or paid, exists to fill that gap.

The deadline leaves no room: proof for each control period must be handed in by the fifth day of the following month, or the first working day after it. Miss it without an excusable reason and the efforts are no longer taken into account at all — not reduced, not counted.

Free tools are common; the work they hand back is not

A tracker is a cheap thing to build, which is why free ones are everywhere. What separates them is not the feature list but how much typing they leave you at the end of the month.

That amount depends on where your applications go. Across the adverts open in our index, 48.1 per cent send the applicant to a domain that does not carry the employer's name — a third-party application system, an industry portal, an agency. Roughly half of what you send leaves no trace on the employer's own site.

Nor are those destinations the same ones twice. For 41.3 per cent of open adverts the application goes through a system several employers share, for 23.8 per cent through one serving ten employers or more, and the rest through systems that sit behind a single company. There is no inbox where your applications quietly pile up, and no confirmation email in a common format.

Put a month's worth of applications through that structure and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable. Draw twelve open adverts at random from our stock and they land, on average, on about eleven different destinations: eleven forms, eleven confirmation emails, in several cases eleven new logins. A free tool that only records what went through one particular platform documents a fraction of your month.

Which reduces the requirement to one line: the free tool has to accept a complete entry in seconds, whatever the application route was. Columns, colours and funnel charts are decoration; the seconds on the day you apply are the whole product.

If you search in English but file in German, read this twice

Searching for work in English is entirely normal in Switzerland. Filing your job-search efforts in English is not: the official proof form is published in German, French and Italian, and even the English-language page of the public employment service links the German version of it. Your RAV works in the language of your canton.

That gap is where a free tool quietly creates work. You take notes in one language and hand in the record in another, and every entry needs a small translation at exactly the moment the deadline is running.

The rule that keeps you out of trouble is to store the job title exactly as advertised, in the advert's own language, and to add your own translation only as a note beside it. A title you translated from memory can no longer be matched against the original advert months later — which is precisely when someone asks you to.

Do the same with the route: write down whether you applied through a portal, by email or on a career page, in plain words. It costs a second on the day and removes an argument later, whichever free tool you happen to use.

The question to ask any free tracker

It is not what does it cost, but how do I get out. Can you download your entries as a file, or print them cleanly? If yes, the free plan is a tool. If no, it is a tenancy — and your evidence is what you are renting space for.

Second: does it keep the advert, or only a link to it? A link is evidence for exactly as long as the page stays up. Storing the text of the advert leaves you holding something once the employer has filled the role and taken the page down.

Third: how long do you need to reach back? A benefit period runs over months rather than weeks, and questions do not always arrive immediately. A tool that hands your records back on demand beats one with more features and no export.

Fourth: whose account is it. A free plan tied to a work address you are about to lose, or to a phone you may replace, is a free plan with a fuse in it. Use a private address, and export once a month.

The spreadsheet is still a serious answer

Every comparison eventually arrives at the same unglamorous option, and there is a reason: a spreadsheet costs nothing, takes ten minutes to set up, and cannot be discontinued. It is also the format most RAV advisers have seen a thousand times, which makes a clean printout easy to hand over as an overview.

Its weakness is behavioural rather than technical. Nothing in a spreadsheet reminds you to follow up, and nothing stops you from leaving a row half-filled. If you apply in bursts and reconstruct afterwards, the missing cells will be exactly the ones nobody can rebuild later.

The pragmatic combination most people land on is a working tool during the month and the official channel at the end of it. Whether the working tool is a spreadsheet, an app, or the saved list beside your job search matters far less than whether the entry is made on the day.

Whatever you choose, keep the attachments with it: the application you sent and the reply you received. That is the part a tracker does not generate for you, and the part that settles a question fastest.

What is free here, and what is not

On SwissJobs.app the free tier covers the job search, tracking your applications and the CV generator. Building a CV and downloading it once need no account at all — no email, no card; it is the second download, and saving a document to come back to, that asks for a free account. Premium is CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, with seven days free first, and the saved list is not behind it.

What you get is deliberately narrow: saved adverts with company, title, location, link and date, an applied tick, an editable date, and a manual entry with a field for contact details — name, email, phone, whatever you have. That manual entry is what covers applications made on a third-party portal or straight by email.

What you do not get, stated as plainly: no kanban board with custom stages, no browser extension that saves from any site, no analytics on your own funnel. Dedicated trackers such as Huntr or Teal are further along on exactly those points. We quote no prices for them, because we did not check their own pages for this text.

And we file nothing. What counts for the RAV goes in through Job-Room or on the form your RAV gives you, by you, on time. The list here exists so that nothing is missing on the fifth of the month — not to replace the official route.

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.

What the law asks of a record

The decisive words sit in Art. 17 para. 1 AVIG. After stating that an insured person must do everything that can reasonably be expected of them to avoid or shorten unemployment, the provision ends with one sentence that carries the whole idea. There is no official English version of the act, so here it is in the German original — «Er muss seine Bemühungen nachweisen können» — that is, you must be able to prove your efforts. Not submit them when asked — be able to prove them. That describes a permanent state, and a folder that only exists on the fifth of the month is not that state.

The counterpart is Art. 26 para. 3 AVIV: the competent office checks the insured person's job-search efforts every month. Art. 27a AVIV defines the unit: every calendar month is a control period. Art. 26 para. 2 sets the handover point, the fifth day of the following month or the first working day after it. Those three provisions are the whole specification for your record: monthly closing, evidence at any time, one deadline.

arbeit.swiss turns the same duty into a physical instruction, and it is worth reading as a checklist rather than as advice: "The RAV will monitor your efforts to find work. Retain all proof carefully, for example in a folder with: emails and letters as well as the responses received. For phone calls and network contacts: make a note of the date, company and person you spoke to. Tip: Always follow up on phone calls with an email attaching your CV. For in-person visits: ask for a business card or company stamp."

Read closely, that paragraph tells you what a tracking system is for. It is not a productivity habit. It is the mechanism that lets you hand your adviser a complete account of a month you have half forgotten, on a day you did not choose.

Beat one: the entry is created on send

One rule carries this beat: the application is not finished until the line exists. Attach, send, write the line, close the tab — in that order. Anything else eventually turns into an evening of reconstruction at the start of the following month, and reconstruction is where records lose the details that make them checkable.

Four things belong in that minute because they disappear afterwards. The advert itself, saved as a PDF or a screenshot, because the text you wrote against is the only evidence that the application was targeted rather than generic. The contact person with a phone number or email address, which the official form gives its own column and which lives nowhere else once the advert is taken down. The workload you applied for — full-time, or part-time with a percentage, also a column on the form. And the channel: by letter or electronically, in person, or by phone, which is the fourth thing the form asks.

Applications that never touch a form need the same discipline in a different shape. A phone call becomes evidence when you note the date, the company and the person, and then send the confirming email with your CV attached — which is precisely what arbeit.swiss recommends. A visit becomes evidence with a business card or a stamp. A speculative application becomes evidence through the sent message itself, so send it from an account you will still control in a year.

The cost comparison is the argument. Written on send, a line takes under a minute. Reconstructed on the fifth of the following month, twelve lines take an evening and still come out worse, because two or three contact names are simply gone.

Beat two: ten minutes a week, three questions

The weekly review is the beat almost everyone skips, and it is the one that turns a pile into a system. Three questions, ten minutes, ideally on the same weekday.

What moved? Every reply that arrived this week — acknowledgement, invitation, rejection — gets written into its line. The official form recognises four results: still open, interview, appointment, rejection, plus a field for the reason a rejection was given. Your own record needs no richer vocabulary than that, because nothing richer will ever be asked of you.

What has been open too long? That is the next section, and it is the question a weekly review exists to raise. Where am I in the month? If you have agreed a number of applications with your adviser, mid-month is when a shortfall can still be made up. At the end of every counselling interview you set targets for the continuing job search — a target checked only on the deadline is not a target.

There is a second benefit that only shows up when something goes wrong. A weekly beat spreads the work so that one week of illness or a few days of holiday does not sink the control period. A record that exists only once a month gives you exactly one chance to miss it.

Beat three: when chasing is worth it depends on your occupation

"Follow up after two weeks" is the most repeated and least founded piece of job-search advice in circulation. How long a vacancy is realistically still being filled can be read off the advert stock, and the differences between fields are large. Measured across the adverts open on SwissJobs.app, the median age of an open advert is 41 days in construction, 24 days in nursing and care, 22 in marketing and communications, 18 in IT and in logistics, 16 in commercial roles, sales and hospitality, and 15 days in engineering.

These numbers do not say when a decision is taken; only the employer knows that. They say how long an advert in that field is typically still open. From that follows a usable rule for the weekly review: while the advert you applied to is still online, a short polite enquiry is an ordinary act. Once it has gone and no answer ever came, the enquiry is rarely a better use of your time than a new application.

For the record itself, this means the "still open" state needs an expiry date, and the expiry date depends on your field. In construction an entry can sit open for a month without going stale. In engineering, decide after a good fortnight: chase, or close it. A record where everything still reads "still open" after three months carries no information for you and none for your adviser.

One detail is easy to miss. The advert almost always disappears before the counselling interview in which you discuss it. That is where the copy saved in beat one earns its keep: it is the only proof that the job was advertised the way you describe it.

Beat four: reconcile in the first days of the month

At the turn of the month exactly one thing happens. You put your own record next to the official proof and compare line by line. If you record in the Job-Room eService called "Efforts to find work", you can pull the month; if you keep the paper form, you have the sheet. You are looking for three things: applications that exist only in your record and still need transferring, lines entered twice, and results that changed after the line was written.

Only then do you submit — on the first or second working day, not on the fifth. The fifth day of the following month is the outer limit under Art. 26 para. 2 AVIV, moving to the next working day when it falls on a weekend or holiday. Treating the outer limit as the appointment leaves you with no margin at all when something goes wrong.

Reconciliation is also the moment the month is closed. Every line gets its final state, applications still running move into the new month, rejections get their reason, and the month's supporting documents go into the file. After that nothing in that month is edited again, which is the difference between a working record and a piece of evidence.

Remember that two recipients are waiting at the turn of the month, not one. The proof of job-search efforts goes to the RAV; the form "Details of the insured person" goes to your unemployment insurance fund. Two forms, two offices, one date — and if you confuse them you have filed on time with the wrong one. If you use the paper forms, fill them in on the computer before printing: the fund reads them with character recognition, which is exactly why arbeit.swiss tells you to open them in Acrobat Reader rather than in a browser.

The file: what you keep, and how it is named

The line is the proof. The supporting documents are something else, and they stay with you until somebody asks. The official form states the duty plainly: written documents such as copies of application letters or rejection letters must be kept and submitted on request.

For the filing itself, one scheme survives contact with reality: one folder per control period, one file per application inside it, named by date, employer and job title in that order. The date sorts itself, the employer makes the line findable in a conversation, and the job title separates two applications to the same house.

Copy the job title exactly as the advert wrote it. Not for tidiness — because your adviser looks up the same words, and because large employers routinely advertise several similar roles at once. If you applied through a recruitment agency, name the agency: the proof should show who actually received the application.

Finally, the step that costs nothing and is rarely taken. Pull an extract of the month when you close it and file it with the evidence. In the counselling interview it is the one document you and your adviser can both look at, and it quietly demonstrates that the record was not assembled the night before.

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 failure is sameness, not volume

Because the question sounds like a capacity problem, it usually gets answered with a change of tool: more columns, a different app, a board with cards. A few weeks later the overview is gone again, which is the clue that capacity was never the constraint.

What kills a list is the moment two lines appear to say the same thing and you can no longer tell which is which. That arrives earlier than people expect — not at a hundred applications, but at the third application to a similar role at the fourth similar employer.

And it arrives because of how the job market is built, not because you were careless. Job titles are standard labels, not names. 13.8 per cent of open postings carry a title that at least two different employers are advertising at the same moment, and 1.5 per cent carry one used by five or more employers simultaneously. In 5.1 per cent of cases the same title in the same place is being advertised by two or more employers at once.

Which makes the title the weakest field you have — and it is precisely the one people write down first and abbreviate most, because it is the thing they were looking at when they hit send.

The line that still means something in six months

There is a simple test. Read one line out loud and ask whether it would let you hold a phone conversation about that application half a year from now. If not, a field is missing. Four of them nearly always carry the weight: employer, exact job title, place, date.

The order in which those four buy you certainty can be measured. Title alone: 69.0 per cent unique. Add the employer and it rises to 77.1 per cent — a smaller jump than most people expect, because the same employer frequently has several identically titled vacancies open at once. Only adding the place produces the step up to 87.2 per cent.

The remaining 12.8 per cent are the argument for the fourth field. These are the cases where employer, title and place are all identical: one role hired several times over, a posting relisted, the same vacancy advertised down two separate routes. The only thing that separates them is the date you applied — and you need that date anyway, because under Swiss unemployment insurance the control period is the calendar month, so every effort belongs to exactly one month.

Everything beyond those four is comfort rather than foundation: the link, the contact person, the workload percentage, the route the application took. Useful, but replaceable. Drop one of the four, though, and the line is not incomplete — it is worthless. It records that something happened without saying what.

The same employer keeps coming back

The second reason lists get muddy is how employers are distributed. The market is anything but flat: 81.0 per cent of open postings come from employers advertising five or more vacancies simultaneously, and 56.1 per cent from employers with twenty or more. The largest one per cent of advertisers account for 31.5 per cent of everything open, the largest five per cent for just over half. Only 6.8 per cent of postings come from an employer with exactly one vacancy open.

Over a benefit framework period of two years that means you will apply to the same houses repeatedly without ever planning to. And at the heavy advertisers the titles repeat too: among employers with five or more open vacancies, 26.5 per cent of their postings carry a title that the same employer is advertising a second time right now. Close to seven in ten of those employers also advertise in more than one place.

So a workable overview needs a second sort order — by employer, not by date. It answers the questions that get awkward in an interview: have I written to this house before, to whom, when, and what came back? And it prevents the two errors this pattern produces: applying twice to the same vacancy, and sending the same person two different versions of your documents.

In practice all this needs is that you spell the employer name the same way every time. A company that appears with its legal form in one posting and without it in the next becomes two employers in your list where there is one. Pick a spelling once and stay with it.

Three lists, three different clocks

Most overviews fail because a single list is asked to do three jobs that run on different clocks. Keep them apart — as three views of one table, not three files.

The first is the live list: everything you are waiting on. Its clock is yours. A posting still being online tells you nothing about your application; shortlisting usually runs in parallel with the advert. If you wait for an external signal you wait indefinitely, so set your own limit instead — ten working days is a sensible number — after which you either follow up or close the line.

The second is the month list: everything dated inside the running calendar month, which is what goes into your proof of job-search efforts. Its clock belongs to the law. What counts is the date you applied, not the current state of play: an application sent on 28 June belongs to June even if the rejection arrives in July.

The third is the archive: everything closed. Its clock runs longest, because a framework period spans two years and questions do not always arrive promptly. Archiving is not deleting — it only means those lines leave the weekly view so that what is genuinely open stays visible.

The quarter of an hour that keeps it alive

A list that is written to but never read is a graveyard. What makes the difference is a short standing appointment with yourself: one weekday, fifteen minutes, always the same slot. Friday morning works for many people because there is still time to act on what it surfaces.

In that quarter of an hour you ask exactly three questions. What has been waiting longer than my own limit? Those lines get a follow-up today or get closed — nothing in between. What is scheduled this week? Interviews, promised call-backs, an appointment at the RAV. What is missing for this month's record? A contact name, an unclear date, an entry with no result recorded.

The return on those fifteen minutes shows up at month end. Tidy weekly and the record takes minutes to copy out; skip it and you reconstruct a whole month from memory and your sent folder, in exactly the days when the deadline is already running. Proof of efforts is due for each control period by the fifth day of the following month, or the first working day thereafter, and efforts filed late without an excusable reason are no longer taken into account.

One small habit carries surprising weight: record the result in the state it is in on that day, and date the change. «Rejected on the 14th» is information. «Rejected» with no date is a memory nobody can check four weeks later.

What to leave out on purpose

Overviews die of too many columns more often than too few. The rule is blunt: a column you never sort, filter or search by is not a column, it is a sticky note. It costs you seconds on every entry and gives nothing back.

You can usually drop self-assessed odds of success, colour codes with more than three levels, free-text fields nobody rereads, and any metric about your own funnel. What share of your applications turn into interviews is an interesting number and a useless one: it changes nothing about what you do tomorrow.

Two fields are worth keeping that are often missing. The route the application took — career page, portal, email, in person — because without it you will not know where to look when someone gets back to you. And the contact person with a way to reach them, where there was one, since that is the only field connecting your line to the outside world.

The rest is discipline on a single point: the entry is created on the day you apply, not at the weekend and not at month end. Anything you reconstruct later is less accurate than the thirty seconds you spend while the confirmation page is still open in front of you.