Application files: naming them, and sending them

The reason is where the file ends up. It does not stay in your folder, it lands in somebody else’s, next to the documents of everyone else who applied. In that folder your surname sorts, the word CV does not. Your own folders want the opposite order, and the cantonal careers service says so explicitly: it recommends a folder per vacancy on your own machine, with the document type leading each file name, and gives two examples in German — bewerbungsbrief-coiffeuse-musterfirma.pdf and lebenslauf-kosmetikerin.pdf.

What belongs in the name is whatever makes the application findable again. The employer name does not do that on its own: 93.2 per cent of the adverts on SwissJobs.app come from an employer with more than one vacancy open at the same time. Adding the job title is not enough either — for 21 per cent of adverts, employer plus exact title is not unique even within that one employer. The thing that is unique is the number in the link you applied through.

• Surname first, then first name, then the document type. Recruiters download attachments into one folder per vacancy. If every file you send starts with your surname, your documents sit together and can be attributed without opening them. If every file starts with the word CV, they scatter among everybody else’s — and there is a fair chance three of those are called exactly the same thing.
• No spaces, no accents, no slashes. A slash cannot go into a file name at all: on a Mac the attempt fails outright, because the character is reserved for folder separation. Accents survive less reliably than they look. Put a name containing an umlaut into a ZIP archive on a Mac and the bytes are stored as UTF-8, but the flag that says so is left unset — by the ZIP specification the name is then to be read as the old IBM code page, and a reader that follows the rule shows M├╝ller.
• Use the reference number instead of the job title. 73.1 per cent of the application links on SwissJobs.app contain a run of four digits or more, six digits at the median. That number sits in the address bar of the form you are filling in and is what the employer’s own system searches on. Six digits at the end of a file name do more work than forty characters of transcribed job title.
• Everything as PDF, and one PDF for the references. The federal guidance is specific twice over: work references, diplomas and certificates should be combined into a single PDF file, complete and in chronological order with the most recent first; and the documents should be saved and sent as PDFs. A dossier of eleven separate attachments contradicts that even if each attachment is beautifully named.
• Keep drafting language out. Final, new, v2, copy, latest — these are notes to yourself, and in a document somebody else reads they look like an open workshop. If you genuinely need to tell versions apart, use the date: four-digit year, month, day, in that order, so the list sorts chronologically by itself.
• The sender is part of the file name. The same federal page asks you to send from a reliable email address that ideally contains your first name and surname. Address, file name and signature should spell your name the same way. Signing as A. Muster, writing from anna.m@ and attaching muster-anna-cv.pdf forces the reader to do a matching exercise nobody asked for.

The market figures were counted on 22 August 2026 from the adverts live on SwissJobs.app at that moment, and use the job title, the employer name and the application link — fields that are stored literally rather than inferred from text. A character counts as unusable if Windows does not allow it in a file name; a title counts as usable unchanged if it contains only English letters, digits and simple punctuation, none of those forbidden characters, and is at most sixty characters long, which is a deliberately generous limit. The uniqueness figures compare strings with strings: two adverts count as identically titled only if their titles match apart from capitalisation, so the number understates rather than overstates how easily two applications can be confused. The reference number is taken as the longest run of four or more digits in the application link and may occasionally denote something else. Platform attribution reads the host name of the application link and identifies about a third of adverts; the remainder is not evidence of anything in particular. The requirements on file names, PDF format and sender address come from the application tips of arbeit.swiss (SECO); the example file names from berufsberatung.ch and its French and Italian sister sites (SDBB, on behalf of the cantons). Slash handling, case sensitivity and the length limit were checked on a current Mac and may differ elsewhere; the statement about names in ZIP archives comes from Appendix D of the ZIP specification.