SwissJobs.app or Google Gemini — can a chatbot do a Swiss CV?

Feature comparison

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

Pricing side by side

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

What Gemini genuinely does well here

Start with the part where the chatbot wins, or the rest is worthless. Gemini’s base tier is free, and Google’s own availability page says the web app runs in more than 70 languages and over 230 countries and territories, with German, French and Italian on the list and Switzerland on the country list. If you are reading this from Berlin, Milan or Manchester and have not moved yet, that matters: some Swiss tools want a local address or an AHV number (the Swiss social insurance number) before they will let you in. Gemini wants a Google Account.

What that buys you is real. A model will rewrite a paragraph of yours into a language you can read but not write — and in a country with four of them, that is not a niche need. It will cut a section that runs three lines long. It will read thirty lines of requirements and tell you which five are load-bearing. And it will argue back: hand it your existing CV and ask which line an outsider would not understand, and you get an answer no template gives you.

There is also a route on which Gemini does touch a formatted document. Google’s availability list for Workspace Experiments shows “Help me create”, the feature that generates formatted documents, in English, French, German and Italian among others. If you already live inside Google Docs, the writing help sits in the document rather than beside it. Anyone who says a chatbot cannot produce documents at all has not read that page.

It is a CV, not a resume — and that is a default, not a preference

Ask any general-purpose model for “a resume” and you get the American article: one page, no photograph, no date of birth, no nationality, an objective statement at the top, references “available upon request” treated as a filler line. That is not stubbornness on the model’s part. It is the centre of gravity of the text it was trained on, and English-language career advice is overwhelmingly American.

The Swiss document differs on nearly every one of those points, and the federal guidance says so in plain terms. arbeit.swiss lists what a CV contains: personal details including a photograph, education, career history, language skills, references. It sets the length ceiling at three pages, not one. And on references it says the opposite of the American cliché — you note in the CV that references can be provided on request, and the actual referee sheet is something you hand over at the interview.

None of that is hidden. It is on a public federal page in four languages. But a chatbot will not apply it unless you tell it to, every time, in every session, because the session is where its memory of your instructions ends. That is the practical cost of using a general tool for a local document: you become the person who has to remember the local rules.

Where the chat stops: the button that makes the file

Gemini has a workspace for longer text called Canvas. You can write in it directly, select a passage and have it rewritten, adjust length and tone, and step back through saved versions. Read the help article, though, and you also learn what the toolbar above that document offers: stylise headings, bold, italic, bulleted lists, numbered lists. That is the complete list.

Fine for an essay. Not fine for a CV, and it fails at exactly the points where a Swiss dossier becomes recognisable: no second column for languages and skills, no place for an application photograph, no control over typeface, colour or where a page breaks. A CV is not a long passage with subheadings.

Then the exit. Google’s export help article enumerates where a Gemini response can go: into a new Google Doc, as a draft in Gmail, a table into Google Sheets, code into Colab or Replit. The Canvas article gives a document two routes — “Export to Docs” and “Copy contents” — and names PDF for slides and for documents containing LaTeX. No Word export appears in either article.

So the path from chat to application file runs through Google Docs, where you lay the document out yourself, and only there do you download a PDF or a Word file. Google adds a line in the same help page worth carrying into a job search: if you export content from Gemini Apps, the terms and policies of the service you export to apply to that content. The text changes product, and the rules change with it.

The price ladder — and the trap on the English page

Open Gemini’s subscription page with Switzerland selected and the amounts are in francs: the free tier is CHF 0 a month with a Google Account; Google AI Plus is CHF 5 and promises twice the usage limits of the free version; Google AI Pro is CHF 17 with four times the limits and includes Gemini inside Gmail, Docs and other apps; Google AI Ultra starts at CHF 100 a month, with CHF 170 for the highest tier.

Now the detail that catches people reading from abroad. The same page in English jumps to “United States” and shows dollars — 0, 4.99, 19.99, 99.99 and 199.99 a month. The country is switchable on the page, but the default is not Switzerland, and the Swiss tier for AI Pro is in fact below the American one. If you are comparing tools before you move, check which country the page thinks you are in before you write the number down.

For the application question the ladder is beside the point anyway. The free tier already writes very good prose, and a single letter needs no subscription. What Google charges for is higher limits, video generation, storage, and having the assistant sit inside the Google apps — not for a finished dossier coming out the other end. Our CHF 15 buys the other half: the document.

What Google itself writes about what you paste in

A CV is not ordinary text. It carries your full name, your address, your date of birth, your residence status, often a photograph, and the name of every employer you have worked for. Before that goes into a chat window, it is worth reading Google’s own privacy notice for Gemini Apps, which says, in its own words: “Please don’t enter confidential information that you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our services, including machine-learning technologies.”

The same page explains what is meant. A subset of chats is reviewed by human reviewers, including trained reviewers from Google’s service providers; they assess whether responses were low-quality, inaccurate or harmful and suggest better ones. And: “Reviewed chats are retained for up to three years.” The consequential sentence sits a few lines above — chats reviewed by human reviewers are not deleted when you delete your activity.

Google names the other periods itself too. Activity auto-deletes after 18 months by default, changeable to 3 or 36 months or not at all. Temporary chats, and anything you type with the Keep Activity setting off, are retained with your account for 72 hours. Even then, Google writes, chats are still used to respond to you and to protect Google, its users and the public, “including with help from human reviewers”.

This is not a scandal. It is a product description Google publishes openly, and it leads to one rule rather than an alarm: give the model the task, not the personal details. “Shorten this paragraph to three lines” does not need your address. “Rewrite my whole CV” hands it over.

The photograph — precisely the file Google’s notice is about

This is where an arriving reader gets the sharpest surprise. If your last application was written for a British or American employer, the habit you carry is to leave the photograph off and to keep the whole thing to one page. Swiss practice runs the other way, and the federal guidance is explicit about it: the English version of arbeit.swiss lists “personal details, including photograph” among the things a CV contains and sets the ceiling at three pages, while the French version goes further still and asks for a photo that shows you at your best.

Which puts a face image squarely inside the territory Google’s notice describes. The wording is direct: if you share a photo with Gemini Apps using the upload feature and the Keep Activity setting is on, your photo is used to improve Google services with the help of human reviewers.

Our editor works differently, and the limit is equally concrete. The photograph sits in the document rather than in a conversation, and it travels into the PDF. It does not travel into the Word file — our DOCX export walks the structure of the document and carries no images. If a recruitment agency asks for a Word file so they can comment in it, that copy goes without the picture.

The lines a Swiss dossier carries that a chat window has no field for

A chat has no fields, so it can neither forget anything nor insist on anything. For a Swiss dossier that is the problem, because a few lines are expected here that carry no weight elsewhere.

The permit is the first. If you do not hold a Swiss passport, your status goes in the document — B, C or G, where G is the cross-border commuter permit — because otherwise the HR department has to work it out instead of reading. With us that is a dedicated profile field: it lands in the header line beside your town and again in the sidebar. A model writes the line only if you remember to ask for it.

The second is the Pensum. Swiss adverts count in per cent, not in hours a week, and if you worked at 80 per cent you write 80 per cent. The third is languages, and here the honest rule is narrower than the usual advice: Swiss postings are not consistent. Some name a level such as B2 or C1, some use a word like “fluent”, some do both. So the rule that survives contact with the market is to state the level the way the advert states it — not to impose one scale everywhere.

The fourth is not a CV line at all but a separate document: the Arbeitszeugnis. arbeit.swiss requires them without gaps, in reverse-chronological order with the most recent first, and assembled into a single PDF file, and says the same for diplomas and certificates. A chat window gives you text. The folder you still assemble yourself.

Our own row, counted in the code

Fairness means auditing our own row as hard as the other one. Counted in the code on 4 September 2026: the editor holds 2 layouts, 3 typefaces and 9 accent colours — 54 design variations, freely combined. Those are not 54 separately designed templates but variations on one Swiss format, and anyone who wants a large gallery of distinct designs is better served by a template vendor.

The flow: you paste a Swiss job advert, the CV is written from it section by section, in about a minute. Then you change any line by hand or by instruction in a prompt box — the same convenience that sends people to a chatbot in the first place, except aimed at the document rather than beside it. At the end there is a download in PDF or Word, with no watermark on either.

Where exactly the account gets demanded is what separates tools of this kind, and here it comes last: the editor opens and generates anonymously, and the email address is asked for at the point of saving and of downloading. A free account then carries 5 documents per day and 10 per rolling seven days, the same allowance for letters and for AI edit instructions. Only beyond that does the paywall begin — seven free days, then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, cancel whenever you like.

And the difference that carries the whole question: the chat knows not one live Swiss vacancy, because jobs advertised this week appear in no training set. We hold over twenty thousand of them. The CV is therefore written not from an impression of what such a role looks like, but from the text the employer wrote this week.

If you are registered with an RAV

People claiming Swiss unemployment benefit must document their job-search efforts. From the applications you track with us, /arbeitsbemuehungen fills in the official federal unemployment-insurance sheet in German, French or Italian. A chatbot has nothing for this: it knows neither your applications nor the form.

The limit belongs in the same paragraph, because it is serious. What counts is what your RAV accepts, and the recording itself belongs on Job-Room or on whatever route your canton requires. We produce the filled-in sheet; your RAV decides whether it counts — not us, and certainly not a chat window.

Short version: who should use which

Use Gemini when you need text and not a document: shorten a passage, move a CV into a language you cannot write, have a long advert read for you, prepare for an interview. It costs CHF 0, handles German, French and Italian, works from outside Switzerland, and if you already work in Google Docs the writing help is right there in the file. For one application, that is often more sensible than any subscription.

Use SwissJobs.app when an application file has to exist at the end, and when it will not stop at one application. The CV is written from the advert, the permit and the Pensum have a field, the photograph sits where Swiss practice expects it, and the download is PDF or Word without a watermark. From the third application onward that is the difference between work and a button.

And one rule holds for both routes: what you paste into a chat window, you paste into someone else’s system, whose retention periods and review process are written down in Google’s own notice. Give the model the task. It does not need your personal details to do it.