Should I include numbers and results in a cover letter?
Updated:
In short
Yes — but two or three concrete results, not a wall of percentages. The reason lies in a quirk of the Swiss market: the adverts themselves are strikingly unquantitative. About 21 percent mention responsibility or remit, but only about 0.5 percent mention targets or metrics, and under one percent mention budget or turnover.
So flooding your text with metrics mirrors not the language of the person reading it but that of a different market. It shows — and it reads as imported rather than assured.
The durable rule: every claim in a cover letter needs evidence, but evidence is a situation with an outcome, not necessarily a number. Where a number is honestly available, use it. Where it is not, describe the change.
Share of analysed advert descriptions using each term. Ongoing analysis, as of August 2026.
- Swiss adverts describe responsibility roughly forty times more often than metrics.
- Two or three evidenced results work better than ten percentages.
- A number without a baseline is not a statement — "grew revenue 30%" says nothing without the starting point.
- In nursing, education, administration and the trades there are often no meaningful metrics; there the described change is the evidence.
- Invented or flattered numbers surface in the interview — and cost more than they earned in the letter.
Why the Swiss market writes less quantitatively
We analysed the advert descriptions we hold for how often they use quantitative terms. The result is unambiguous: responsibility and remit appear in about 21 percent, project leadership in a good four, optimisation in a good four. Targets, KPIs and metrics, by contrast, appear in about half a percent, budget or turnover in under one percent, a stated team size in a good half.
So a Swiss posting describes what someone is responsible for, not which number they are meant to move. That is not sloppiness but a difference of register: the local tone prefers factual description to the metric, and understatement with evidence reads as more serious than a large number without context.
It does not follow that results are irrelevant — on the contrary, the most common substantive feedback from recruiting is that applicants list responsibilities instead of measurable outcomes. It follows only that the dose differs from an Anglo-Saxon cover letter.
Practically: two or three results in the whole letter, each tied to a requirement from the advert. Not a number in every sentence.
What makes a result usable
A result has three parts: the starting situation, your action, the change. Without the first part the number is worthless. "Grew revenue by 30 percent" can mean anything — from a very small base to a market effect you had nothing to do with.
Compare: "Purchasing ran through two suppliers; I expanded it to five and cut lead time from ten days to seven." That is checkable, it invites a follow-up question, and it works without a percent sign.
Watch attribution. Say what you did, not what the department achieved. A letter that presents team results as personal ones surfaces at the latest in the interview, when someone asks for detail.
And keep the number small enough to stand behind. Round figures from memory are risky; if you no longer know the exact value, write the order of magnitude and say so openly in the interview.
When your occupation yields no numbers
That is the normal case, not the exception. In nursing, education, administration, the trades and much of social work there is no revenue figure attributable to you — and trying to construct one reads as false immediately.
There the evidence is the described change. "Handovers were not documented; I introduced a simple record the team has used ever since." That is a result. It has no number and is still checkable, because it describes a before and an after.
Also legitimate, and often stronger, are scale figures rather than impact figures: how many residents you cared for, how many cases you handled, how large the team was, how many sites you served. Those are facts rather than claims of success, and they place you immediately.
Duration and repetition work too. "Four years on the same night shift with the same team" says more about you in a field with high turnover than any percentage.
Where results belong — letter or CV
Both, but differently. On the CV the result sits briefly at the role where it happened: one line, factual, no narrative. There you may have more than three, because a CV is scanned rather than read.
In the letter it is spelled out, but only twice or three times — and each time explicitly tied to a requirement from the advert. The sentence before should name the requirement, the sentence after the result. That coupling is the actual purpose of a cover letter.
Avoid repetition. If the same result appears word for word on the CV and in the letter, you have wasted one of the two places. The letter needs the context; the CV needs only the outcome.
And order them by the advert, not by your pride. The result evidencing the most important requirement comes first — even if another one means more to you personally.
The mistakes numbers make in a cover letter
The first is the wall of figures. A paragraph with four percentages does not read as competent but as a template. It is also one of the patterns by which machine-written letters are recognised, because language models like producing metrics in series.
The second is the unsupportable number. Anything you could not explain if asked — where the figure came from, over what period, what your share was — should not be in the letter. The question reliably comes, precisely because numbers are rare in Swiss applications and therefore stand out.
The third is confusing activity with result. "Conducted over 200 client conversations" is an activity count, not a result. It describes effort, not effect — and effort is exactly what a CV already shows.
The fourth is false precision. "Reduced lead time by 34.7 percent" does not read as more precise but as constructed. Round honestly and say "by about a third".
What people report
A typical mistake named for international applicants recurs: listing responsibilities instead of measurable outcomes, alongside sending the same documents to every role. Both concern the same gap — the missing evidence that the experience fits this particular job.
Recurring observation in LinkedIn posts by hiring professionals on the Swiss application file, reviewed August 2026.
Recruiting simultaneously describes the opposite picture: applications with a standard letter that could equally well have gone to a completely different organisation. A concrete, attributable result is the one thing that reliably separates such a letter from a template.
Recurring theme in German-language LinkedIn posts from recruiting professionals, reviewed August 2026.
Shares from our ongoing analysis of the Swiss job adverts we track, as of August 2026. The basis is the advert descriptions we hold; we count whether each term occurs. Condensed versions can omit individual mentions, so the shares are more of a lower bound — which does not change the ratio between responsibility language and metric language. We publish shares, not absolute inventory figures.
Sources
Related questions
What our job index says about the Swiss market
Computed live from our own index, not quoted from a study. Shares only, as of today.
Language the advert is written in
- Deutsch
- 60%
- English
- 23%
- Français
- 13%
- Italiano
- 3%
Of adverts that state a language requirement, the share asking for
- Deutsch
- 70%
- English
- 43%
- Français
- 21%
- Italiano
- 3%
19% posted in the last 7 days · Largest markets: Zürich 18% · Bern 10% · Genève 5% · Basel 5%