How do I write a cover letter for a speculative application in Switzerland?

The eight fields Switzerland uses to describe a job

When the advert is missing, the useful question is not «how do I sound interested» but «what would the advert have said». Swiss law answers that unusually precisely, because it once had to write down the minimum description of a vacancy. Under Art. 53b para. 2 of the Employment Services Ordinance, an employer registering a post transmits: the occupation sought; the activity, including any special requirements; the place of work; the workload; the start date; the type of employment relationship, fixed-term or permanent; a contact address; and the employer's name.

This is not a rule about applications, and a letter that ticked the list like a form would be worse, not better. But it is the grid in which an open post is described, passed on and filed in Switzerland. A speculative letter that occupies the same fields can be handled internally the way a vacancy is handled. One that leaves them blank has to be translated first, and nobody does that work for you.

Four of the fields only you can fill, and they belong in the first three lines: occupation, workload, place, start date. «I am writing speculatively as a laboratory technician, 80 per cent, Basel area, available from 1 November» is a complete proposal — it can be answered, forwarded and filed. A letter without those four requires four questions back before anyone can even think about it.

Two more are almost always missing, which is exactly why they are worth including. The first is contract type. A half-sentence saying that you would also take a maternity cover, a project or a fixed-term post multiplies the occasions on which your letter fits — and those appointments are the ones most often made without an advert. Only 2.7 per cent of the adverts in our index carry fixed-term, temporary or cover wording at all.

The second is «the activity, including any special requirements». In a cover letter that means not a list of your previous positions but the two or three things you could take off someone's desk, described in that employer's own words. Telling a hospital you can cover night and weekend shifts says more than three paragraphs about teamwork, because it names a gap that genuinely exists there.

What a letter cannot beat

The hidden job market speculative applications are sold on does exist in Switzerland — just not as a stock of secret advertisements. It consists of appointments for which no advertisement is ever written, and those cases are named in law. Art. 53d of the Employment Services Ordinance exempts three of them from the registration duty: posts filled inside a company or group with someone who has been there at least six months, expressly including apprentices kept on after their apprenticeship; employment lasting no more than 14 calendar days; and the hiring of close relatives of authorised signatories. Art. 21a para. 5 of the Foreign Nationals and Integration Act adds a fourth: if the post goes to someone already registered with the public employment service, no registration is needed.

Against the first three, no letter competes. The internal move is decided before anyone outside hears of it; the two-week stand-in is in place before an application could be written. The fourth is reachable — but by registering with a regional employment centre, which is also what opens the five-working-day head start on registered vacancies, not by writing to anybody. Confusing the two means writing letters against a process you could simply join.

What remains is the case a speculative application is actually built for: the job that does not exist yet. It appears when somebody resigns, when a contract lands, when a return from parental leave turns out differently than planned. At that moment someone looks first at what is already on file. So a speculative application is not an enquiry, it is a delivery made in advance — and it has to survive filing.

That sets the hardest rule about form: it must be forwardable. A letter that narrates ten years gets read and forgotten. One that states role, workload, place and date in its opening lines gets filed and found again, because it contains a term somebody will later search for.

Who to write to, in numbers

Recipient choice is the biggest lever in a speculative application, and it is measurable. In our ongoing analysis of the Swiss adverts we index, 45.0 per cent of employers have exactly one live advert and hold 6.8 per cent of the adverts between them. At the other end, the 4.4 per cent of employers carrying 25 or more adverts hold 51.2 per cent of the market.

Rhythm matters more than size, and the two travel together. Among employers with a single live advert, 9.5 per cent published something new in the previous seven days. For two to four adverts it is 21.6 per cent, for five to nine 34.3 per cent, for ten to 24 it is 59.1 per cent, and for 25 or more, 75.7 per cent. Over 30 days the gap narrows — 56.2 against 95.1 per cent — but the ordering holds.

The rule that falls out is simple. An employer with five or more live adverts today will almost certainly advertise again within the month: among those carrying five to nine, 99.5 per cent do. An employer with a single advert may still be the right one, but writing to it is a bet on a case rather than on a pattern.

One employer in four carries close to three quarters of the market: 26.8 per cent published both in the last 30 days and in the window before it, and they hold 71.9 per cent of all live adverts. That group is where a speculative list starts — not the companies that happen to come to mind.

The English-language segment is the most scattered of the four, which makes targeting matter more, not less. Among adverts written in English, 51.5 per cent of employers have a single live advert and the biggest employers hold 27.8 per cent of the segment, against 48.0 per cent in the German-language segment. There are fewer very large senders to write to and a longer tail to sort through.

The employers who want speculative applications say so — in other words

Before writing blind, look for the people who have already invited you. Roughly one advert in 550 in our index carries the invitation in its title, and 86.7 per cent of these invitations sit in the title rather than in the body, which means an ordinary job search finds them.

Who issues them is the interesting part. Employers using the invitation carry a median of seven live adverts against two for all employers, and 69.7 per cent of them have five or more adverts against 24.6 per cent across the index. The companies asking for speculative applications are not the quiet ones — they are the ones already advertising most, which inverts the common advice to approach firms with no visible openings.

In English the channel is almost always called something else, and that is why most people never find it. 16 advert titles in our index use talent pool or talent community wording — Mars, SUSE, Givaudan, Merkle, Ingram Micro, Blueprint Medicines, Coherent, Callista and UNSW among them — against six that say open, spontaneous or unsolicited application, such as Founderful, Creaholic, evulpo, Cysec and La Prairie. Searching for «speculative application» alone misses most of the channel.

If your target is on neither list, the letter stays the same but the route changes: it goes through an existing advert. 81.4 per cent of the application links in our index point to an employer's own address rather than a portal. Open one of that employer's live adverts, use the channel it offers there, and state in the first sentence which role you are applying for — even if that role is not on today's list.

What goes in the letter, and what does not

The structure is short. First the proposal in one sentence, with role, workload and date. Then two or three observations showing you know this employer rather than the sector — a site, a department, a shift pattern, a process, a quirk of the trade — and what you would take on. Only then your background, and only the part that supports the proposal. Reverse that order and you are asking the reader to write the proposal for you.

What does not belong is equally clear. The sentence about admiring the company, the paragraph about your intrinsic motivation, qualities with no evidence behind them — and above all the question of whether «there might possibly be an opportunity». A speculative application that asks a question gets an answer and is finished. One that makes an offer stays in the file.

Salary does not belong in a first letter either. With no post there is no grade for a figure to attach to, so any number is either too high for a job that does not exist yet or too low for the one that appears. A line on availability replaces it entirely.

On following up, which is more legitimate here than anywhere else: since no process is running, nobody owes you a timeline. A single follow-up two or three weeks later, repeating the role and the date and adding nothing else, is not an imposition. It puts the document back on top at a moment when the need may have changed.

And if you are registered with a regional employment centre, whether a speculative application counts towards your monthly job-search proof is a separate question with its own answer: in short it counts, but SECO's guide allows it only as a supplement. That changes nothing about the letter. It does change how you plan the month — a speculative application is added to your replies to advertised roles, not substituted for them.