How do I tailor my CV per job?

What actually differs between two adverts with the same title

Tailoring advice is usually asserted rather than measured, so we measured it. We reduced every Swiss advert we hold to its job title, stripped the noise that Swiss titles carry — bracketed additions, workload percentages, gender markers — and kept the titles that appear at two or more different employers. Every pair drawn from that set is exactly the situation you are in: two vacancies, one dossier, and the question of what to change.

The answer is lopsided. Location differs in 86 per cent of pairs. Required languages differ in 37.4 per cent of the pairs where both adverts state a language requirement at all. The language the advert is written in changes in 17.1 per cent, and the employment type in 14.6 per cent.

Restrict the comparison to pairs where both adverts carry all four fields and the picture sharpens: 90.3 per cent differ in at least one field, 46 per cent in at least two, and 9.7 per cent are identical across all four. The finding cuts both ways. An untouched dossier almost never lands exactly right; a rewritten one almost always changes far more than the evidence justifies.

What matters just as much is the field that never appeared in this measurement. No pair of adverts asked for a different working life. What moves between Swiss vacancies is circumstance, not biography.

Tailoring is version control, not authorship

The practical consequence is to stop thinking in documents and start thinking in versions. A version is a finished dossier for one language situation: German throughout for a German-language requirement, English with German named at a stated level, French for Romandy. The advert selects the version; after that only small moves remain.

How many versions you need is also a measurable quantity. Across everything we hold, four language combinations account for 82.8 per cent of adverts and six account for 91.5 per cent, even though roughly ninety distinct combinations appear in total. The long tail is real but thin.

Within one occupation it gets narrower still. Two versions cover four fifths of nursing vacancies; three cover IT, and three cover the construction and logistics trades; four cover retail; five cover hospitality, which is the most linguistically mixed field we measure. So the honest budget is two to five dossiers built properly once, then field swaps forever after.

Employers behave the same way from the other side. For an employer with several vacancies open, the median share of its own adverts falling into a single language combination is 80 per cent. Applying twice to the same company almost always means applying with the same version — which is fortunate, because two dossiers that disagree about your own history is the one failure mode tailoring can actually cause.

Location is the field nearly everyone skips

Eighty-six per cent is a large number for a field that career advice barely mentions. Between two adverts with the same title, the place of work changes almost every time, and with it the commute, the ability to start, and sometimes the language region. Anyone who tailors per advert without touching the location has skipped the single most variable thing about the job.

What needs adapting is not your address but the statement about reaching the job. One line in the profile that settles it — where you live and how far that is, whether you would move, when you could start — answers the question that otherwise stays open in screening. It is a new question for every advert, because the place is new every time.

There is one special case worth knowing, because it saves real time. In 14.7 per cent of the adverts we hold, the same employer is running the same title in more than one location. Those are not two chances; they are one role with several sites, and two laboriously differentiated applications land on the same desk. Apply once, to the location you can actually reach, and say in the covering note that the other site would also work.

The language line pays best per minute

In 37.4 per cent of pairs where both adverts state a language requirement, that requirement is different. After location it is the most mobile field — and unlike location it usually decides screening rather than comfort.

The level asked for is remarkably uniform. Where a language is named, 84 per cent of mentions ask for professional working level, 11.7 per cent for conversational, 2.9 per cent for native, and just 1.4 per cent for basic knowledge. The middle ground barely exists: Swiss adverts rarely ask for a little of a language.

Three rules follow. Every version lists all your languages, each with a level on the European reference scale, so the claim is checkable at all. The order follows the advert, because the language named first is usually the working language of the team. And the level stays what it is — a level nudged up by one notch survives until the first minute of the interview and costs more than the rejection it was meant to avoid.

One field is routinely confused with this one: the language the advert text is written in. It differs in 17.1 per cent of pairs and is a separate decision. The language of the posting is not a reliable guide to the language of the dossier; the requirement stated inside the advert is.

Workload: rarely in the advert, often the reason for the no

Among adverts that state an employment type at all, 91 per cent are full time and 6.1 per cent part time, with a thin remainder of fixed-term, internship and contract work. Only 22.1 per cent of titles carry a workload percentage. The fact many applicants care about most is usually absent from the advert.

Between two adverts with the same title, the employment type differs in 14.6 per cent of the pairs where both state it. That is infrequent enough not to justify a separate dossier and frequent enough to be worth a glance per advert.

The adaptation is a line, not a rebuild. If you want a specific workload, put it in the same place in every version: the workload you are looking for, the earliest start date, and the range you would accept. When the advert says nothing, your own figure is not a liability — it is the only information on the subject that exists. If neither side states it, the question surfaces in the interview, which you may not have reached without the line.

What does not change per advert

Everything a third party could verify is immovable: dates, employers, job titles you actually held, qualifications, references, language certificates. None of it changes because the vacancy changed, and every movement in it creates the exact problem tailoring is supposed to prevent.

The expensive failure in tailoring is not too little effort but too many drafts. Build a fresh document per application and after twenty applications you hold twenty dossiers that contradict each other in small ways — an end date here, a job title there. Those contradictions surface the moment two people at the same company compare two of your applications, which is a common event at employers with several open roles.

So keep one source: a master document holding the immovable part, the two to five versions derived from it, and one file per application named for your surname, the role and the date. What you change per advert should be describable in a single sentence. If it takes more than a sentence, you have not tailored anything — you have invented a second person.

The twenty-minute pass

Order matters, because the first two steps can stop applications that were never going anywhere. Start by choosing the version: which language combination does this advert ask for, and which of your dossiers matches it? Two minutes, and it is the only decision that touches the whole document.

Then location: residence, travel time or willingness to move, and the earliest start date, in one line of the profile written for this site. Then the language line: every language with a level, ordered as the advert orders them. Then the workload and start-date line. Four moves, roughly ten minutes together.

The final step is the only one that engages with the content of the advert. In your current role and the one before it, reorder the bullet points so the two verifiable things the advert states as conditions sit at the top. Reorder — do not rewrite. Then name the file, read it once, and send it.

After the second time, this pass takes under twenty minutes. That is the real return of working in versions: it turns tailoring from an evening's work into a step that no longer prevents the application from being sent.

When tailoring cannot help

Two situations make every minute spent on the document a loss. The first is a hard condition: a permit you do not hold, a professional registration you lack, a language level you cannot claim. Someone checks those independently of how you present yourself. They cannot be closed by phrasing, and the honest handling of them belongs in the covering note rather than the CV.

The second is the signal hidden inside the act of tailoring. If an advert would require you to change more than the four mobile fields — a different working life, different qualifications, a different profile — you are applying outside your segment. That is a search problem, not a document problem, and it is solved faster by moving the search than by bending the dossier.

Between those two cases sits the ordinary majority: vacancies that suit you and differ in place, language, text language and workload. For those, one maintained version and twenty minutes is the whole job.