SwissJobs.app or the jobs.ch CV templates — a template or a tailored CV?

Feature comparison

Everything about jobs.ch Lebenslauf-Vorlagen was read from the vendor's own page on 4 September 2026; our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow. "not stated" means it could not be read on their site — not "does not exist".

Pricing side by side

Everything about jobs.ch Lebenslauf-Vorlagen was read from the vendor's own page on 4 September 2026; our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow. "not stated" means it could not be read on their site — not "does not exist".

What is actually inside the four files

The page is called «Lebenslauf Vorlage zum Downloaden» and offers four files: tabular, classic Swiss, modern and creative. On 4 September 2026 all four downloaded without registration and without an email prompt. Three are .docx and the creative one is a .doc, the older Word format. Word's own document properties count each of them as two pages, which matches Swiss practice.

Open them and it becomes clear that these are not four templates but four designs over two invented CVs. The tabular and the classic Swiss carry the same man — «Geschäftsleiter mit umfassender Online-Erfahrung», an address in Zurich, a round portrait photo. The modern and the creative carry the same woman, a marketing specialist. Both careers are the same industry: client management, project management, media events, a stint presenting collections at Baselworld, internships at a discount portal in Berlin, a master's and a bachelor's from the University of Bern with a final grade of 5.5.

That is not a complaint. A filled-in example teaches more than an empty grid, and jobs.ch describes the files exactly that way — they serve «als Muster, wie du deinen CV richtig formatierst», as a specimen of how to format your CV. It does mean, though, that what you download is somebody else's career and that your first job is deleting it. In the tabular file that means seven positions with about thirty bullet lines, two awards, two certificates and five hobbies.

There is a practical warning on the page itself that is easy to scroll past: make sure you have the newest version of Word installed «damit die Formatierung korrekt ist» — so that the formatting comes out right. The modern template is built entirely from text boxes floating on the page. That looks the way it should in the intended version of Word, and slides somewhere else in Pages, LibreOffice or Google Docs.

The sentence that settles the argument is on their own page

Above the four download buttons, jobs.ch writes: choose the template that best suits «dir, der Stelle und dem Unternehmen» — you, the position and the company. That is the whole dispute in one line. Fitting the document to the position and the company is the job there too; what is offered for it is a choice between four designs.

The same group says it more explicitly in French. On jobup.ch, under how to personalise a CV template: «Adaptez le contenu : remplacez les textes génériques par des informations pertinentes et concrètes», and «Ajoutez des mots-clés : utilisez les termes spécifiques au poste». Replace the generic text; add the vocabulary of the specific post. That is an accurate description of the work a template leaves you — and an accurate description of what a generator does from the advert text.

So the difference does not need inflating. A template decides what your CV looks like. It cannot decide what it says, because it has never seen the advert.

One career as the specimen — and who is actually hiring

If all four files come from the same industry, the counter-check is worth running: how many people applying in Switzerland are in that industry? We sorted the open adverts in our own index by keyword families in the job title, apprenticeships and internships excluded. Among the English-language adverts, IT and engineering dominate at 29.3 per cent, ahead of sales and retail at 9.2, administration and finance at 5.1, marketing and communications at 4.0, health and care at 1.5 and the building trades at 0.7.

Marketing is at its highest share in exactly the language you are reading — 4.0 per cent of English adverts against 1.2 per cent of German ones — and it is still a small slice. For a software engineer, a lab technician or a supply-chain planner, the file shows the correct format and the correct order, while every content example inside it belongs to a stranger in a different profession. A specimen helps most where you find your own wording hardest, which is precisely where it has nothing to offer you.

A second figure from the same pool explains why one finished CV rarely lasts. Normalise the job titles — strip the brackets, the workload percentages and the gender tags — and a hundred open English-language adverts still carry about 82 distinct titles. The market barely repeats itself. Ten applications in a week are almost always ten differently named roles, described in different words.

What the template does that we do not

The file belongs to you. It lives on your own disk, it works on a train with no signal, it will still open in five years, and nobody can switch it off, put a price on it or move it behind a login. With us, saving and downloading need an account, and past the first download it is the trial or the subscription. That is the most honest advantage a Word file has over any online tool, and it weighs a lot if you are writing exactly one application.

Then there is total control of the layout. In Word you nudge a block two millimetres, add a rule, change one line spacing. We offer 54 design variations — two layouts, three fonts, nine accent colours, freely combined — but they are variations on one Swiss format, not a blank canvas. And the creative file from jobs.ch goes further visually than anything we produce: for design, media and advertising, where the sheet itself is read as a work sample, it is the better choice.

Fairness also requires saying that these files are more carefully Swiss than most free templates on the internet. European language levels instead of skill bars, a portrait photo as a matter of course, no signature block at the foot of the page. What they lack is a line for the residence permit — a detail applicants without a Swiss passport are normally expected to state, and one you will have to add yourself.

What we do that the template cannot

The draft comes out of the advert. Open the generator from an advert on our site and the advert text is already there — no copying and pasting, because the job board and the CV editor sit inside one product. The sections are written against that text rather than against a general idea of your profession.

After that the handwork starts, and it is not less work than in Word, only differently distributed: every line can be clicked and edited, and a prompt box takes instructions in plain language — shorter, more factual, drop that position. The same applies to the motivation letter. Both leave as PDF and as a Word file, and neither format carries a watermark.

Every application keeps its own version, with the advert text stored beside it. For anyone registered with the RAV, the official job-search-efforts form can be filled from the applications you have tracked — we produce the completed sheet; whether it is accepted is your RAV's decision. And all four national languages have their own pages: the finished document comes out in whichever language the interface is set to, which in a country with four language regions is not a detail.

The language question decides more than you would think

If you are arriving from abroad, the practical finding of this comparison is not about design at all. There is no English Job Coach on jobs.ch at all — the English address for it answers with a 404 — and the Italian one redirects to the German site. The templates themselves are German documents: German section headings, German example text, a German file name.

That is workable if you read German and are applying in German. It is a real obstacle if your application goes out in English to an international employer in Zug or Basel, because you would be translating the scaffolding before you start writing. Open adverts written in English make up roughly a fifth of our index, and among them almost three in ten are IT and engineering roles — the segment most likely to be filled from abroad.

It is also worth knowing what neither tool requires. Neither asks for a Swiss address or a social-security number before you can produce a document, so both work from outside the country. What changes once you are here is the dossier around the CV: the Arbeitszeugnis from your previous Swiss employer, the permit letter, and language levels that a Swiss employer reads as a claim rather than a courtesy.

Which one to pick

Take the jobs.ch template if you are writing a single application, do not want an account, are comfortable in Word and German, and want a file that belongs to you. Take it too if you want to design: the creative file goes further than we do, and in design, media and advertising that is the point.

Take SwissJobs.app if several Swiss adverts are in front of you and each version should carry that advert's vocabulary — and if you need PDF and Word without a watermark at the end, in the language of the advert, including English and Italian, where the other option does not exist.

And the route that uses both: download the Word file, study the structure and the order, then write the content against the specific advert. The layout is free and it is yours; the wording is the work that counts. Splitting the two is not a mistake.