Tailoring your CV to the job — how many versions you actually need

How far two adverts for «the same job» actually drift

Advice to tailor your CV is everywhere; the size of the gap being tailored for is almost never stated. It can be counted. Take the postings on SwissJobs.app that carry a substantial description, extract from each which requirement themes it names at all — leadership, project work, shift duty, a driving licence, a vocational or academic qualification, a certificate, an ERP system, a programming language, customer contact — and then compare adverts pair by pair. The share of themes two adverts have in common is a blunt but honest measure of how alike two jobs are.

For two adverts with the same normalised job title that share is 59.7 per cent on average, and 34.7 per cent of the pairs fall below half. Restrict the comparison to pairs from two different employers and the average drops to 42.3 per cent, with 54.4 per cent of pairs below half and only 20.3 per cent identical. Compare two adverts from the same occupational field without requiring the same title and 21.7 per cent is what remains. In 6.1 per cent of same-title pairs the two adverts share not a single named requirement.

The most useful figure is the one nobody expects: within a single employer. Looking only at companies advertising several roles at once, their own adverts agree on 35.5 per cent of requirement themes, and 67.7 per cent of those pairs share less than half. Two applications to the same company are therefore rarely two applications to the same profile. A CV maintained as «the version for this employer» is organised around the wrong attribute — the advert, not the company, is the unit that varies.

Counting the versions your field needs

The same data answers the practical question. Work through a field and find the requirement theme present in the most adverts; then the theme covering most of what is left; then a third. Each step corresponds to one version of your CV — a document whose top third is built around that theme. Stop when the next step adds little.

Fields differ enormously. Retail is nearly a one-version field: selling appears in 90.8 per cent of its adverts, and adding customer contact reaches 96.1 per cent. In health and care, training and diploma language covers 50.2 per cent, and with instructing colleagues and continuing education the three together reach 90 per cent. Commercial and administrative roles get to 81.6 per cent with instructing, customer contact and administration; construction and trades to 82.1 per cent with vocational qualification, instructing and customer contact.

IT is the outlier. Its most common theme, cloud and operations, appears in only 34.1 per cent of adverts; adding project work and customer contact reaches 68 per cent, and a fourth version led by programming languages is genuinely worth having. Logistics stops at 61 per cent after three steps and fiduciary work at 61.6 per cent. The working rule: three versions for most fields, four for IT and finance, one for retail — and everything past that is a five-minute edit on a single advert rather than another document.

The four things that change, and the six that never do

The headline carries most of the difference. Job titles in Switzerland are rarely standard: among project-management adverts, 86.3 per cent of the titles are phrasings no other advert uses; in nursing 77.9 per cent; in commercial administration 82.8 per cent. Retail is the exception, where titles repeat heavily. So the line above your name should echo the advert's own wording rather than your internal job label — one line of work, and the most visible difference between two versions.

Weighting comes next. The same role can occupy three lines in one version — team size, budget, outcome — and one line in another. A leadership version that names the team and the budget, and a specialist version that names the systems and the caseload instead, invent nothing and still read as two different documents. Skill order belongs here too: languages near the top when the advert asks for two of them, further down when it does not.

What must not move: months and years, exact employer names, the job title as written in your reference letter, workload percentages, qualifications with their year, and the language levels you claim. Those six are checkable, and the same dossier usually contains the documents that check them. A quick test before sending — put the version next to your most recent reference letter. Anything the letter does not say must at least not contradict it.

Language is a second axis, and in Switzerland it is unavoidable

Beyond the professional focus there is a second reason to hold more than one CV, and it is more pressing here than in most markets. 72.8 per cent of postings state a language requirement at all, and 27.6 per cent of those name two languages or more. Where German is asked for, 88.9 per cent of the time the level requested is professional rather than conversational, so the language line is not decoration.

The language the advert itself is written in shifts sharply by city. In Zurich 43.3 per cent of postings are in German and 33.5 per cent in English; in Basel 54.5 against 22.2 per cent; in Geneva 40.1 per cent are in English and 31.6 per cent in French; in Lausanne 52.8 per cent French and 22.2 per cent English; in Lugano 45.1 per cent Italian and 28.6 per cent English. Someone searching across the language border needs a second full document, not a variant of the first.

That the two axes overlap shows in one more count: of the job titles that appear more than once, 11.5 per cent appear in more than one language region. The same occupation is advertised in Geneva and in Zurich, in different languages and with different vocabulary. Translating word for word helps little — occupational titles, qualifications and reference-letter phrasing each have a settled form per language, and a Swiss EFZ is a CFC in French, not a «federal certificate».

Copy, name, log — the filing half of the job

The Swiss careers service describes the mechanics of multiple versions more concretely than most career advice, even though its pages address apprenticeship applications: send your documents as PDFs, but keep the editable file of the CV and of every letter, so that for each new application you can make a copy and adapt it. Keep the original editable, copy, adapt, export — that is the whole workflow, and it transfers to adult applications unchanged.

Then the folders. The same guidance recommends one main folder for application material with sub-folders for CV, letters and attachments, plus a separate folder for every position and file names that cannot be mixed up. Ten applications then leave you ten traceable folders instead of one file with ten saved states. For what is actually sent, arbeit.swiss is explicit: save and send the documents as PDF files, and combine all reference letters, diplomas and certificates into one PDF.

The third piece is the log, and it is the one people skip. arbeit.swiss lists it under active job searching — a record of applications sent, procedures under way and answers still outstanding. The moment you work with several versions, that record needs one extra column: which version went to which advert. Two weeks later, when the phone rings, it is the only fact you actually need.

How this works in the SwissJobs.app builder

The CV builder is built around exactly this workflow. Your documents sit in a list, each with its own title, and there is no cap on how many you keep. From any of them, «Duplicate» copies the content and the styling into a new document that carries the original name plus «(copy)» until you rename it. That is the master-plus-copy mechanic without the file management.

For cutting a version to a specific advert there are two routes. «Tailor for another job» opens the wizard with the chosen CV as the template and asks for the new advert text. And the check on /cv-check compares an existing document against one advert and returns a breakdown: a fit percentage, the keywords found and missing, and specific fixes ranked by urgency. Ask it to build the improved version and you get a new document named after the job title — the original stays untouched.

Two small details matter more day to day than any template. Each document keeps its earlier states and you can return to one of them, so an over-aggressive edit costs nothing. And the document title becomes the file name on PDF export, which means naming your versions properly also solves the file-naming problem that usually goes wrong at the last minute.

When a separate version is not worth it

Speculative applications do not need one. There is no advert to align with, and arbeit.swiss treats the speculative approach as a supplement to the regular search rather than a substitute — the tailoring there happens in the letter and in what you know about the employer. Send the standing version for your field and spend the saved time on research about the company instead.

Highly repetitive fields do not need one either, and the numbers say which those are. Retail titles and requirements repeat so heavily that two versions would end up nearly identical. In that situation the second version is better invested in another language than in another professional angle.

Finally there is an upper limit. Three or four versions can be kept current; twelve cannot. If you find yourself rewriting from scratch for every application, the problem is usually not versioning but targeting — too many fields at once. The better answer is not another file but a decision about which two fields you are genuinely applying in, and one well-known version for each.

Word or PDF — which, when

PDF is the default. Send Word only when the other side asks for it — recruiters often do, because they add their own logo.

Your file goes into a form, not into an inbox

The Word-or-PDF question comes from the era when an application was an email with attachments. In the Swiss market that era has closed: of the active adverts on SwissJobs.app, none routes to an email address and every one routes to a web page. What decides the format is therefore no longer what a human finds convenient to open, but what a form lets through — and that is normally printed as a small line directly under the field you drag the file into.

The destinations are also remarkably scattered. Across the whole index the ten most common addresses cover about a third of adverts, while roughly fifteen per cent of adverts sit on addresses that carry five postings or fewer in total. There is no single form you can learn once and then operate for the rest of your search. The only preparation that carries everywhere is a file that is accepted everywhere.

English-language adverts concentrate differently from the rest. Two thirds of them end in a named international application system — Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, Workday and their peers — where the German-language adverts scatter across Swiss platforms and employers' own pages. That is why an English application in Switzerland so rarely looks like a posted dossier and so often looks like a form with a required CV field, an optional cover-letter field and a list of questions underneath.

What twenty forms in the index explicitly allow

For this answer the application destinations behind the adverts were opened in order of how many adverts they carry, and counted wherever the form names its permitted file types. Twenty forms say it outright. All twenty allow PDF. Twelve also allow .doc or .docx, eight allow image files, seven allow plain text or RTF. Eight of the twenty allow nothing but PDF. And none of the twenty allows Word without also allowing PDF — the set where Word is permitted sits entirely inside the set where PDF is permitted.

The spread behind those numbers follows no pattern of company size. Three Swiss firms in the index — a consultancy, a planning office and a construction group — accept PDF only. The international application software carrying much of the English-language advertising names pdf, doc, docx, txt and rtf. A Swiss application platform names PDF, DOC, DOCX, JPEG and PNG up to 50 MB. One employer portal puts it the other way round and writes into the page: please upload your documents as PDF, maximum 50 MB.

Twenty is a small number because most forms never state a format at all — on the remaining destinations opened, the delivered page carried no such statement. That is precisely the argument. Where nothing is stated you know nothing, and the one file accepted in every case that did state something is the PDF. As a rule of thumb that is weaker than a law and stronger than an opinion.

The size ceiling is the trap, not the extension

Thirteen of the counted forms give a maximum file size. The values are 2, 3, 5, 5, 10, 10, 15, 32 and, repeatedly, 50 MB. Between the tightest and the loosest there is a factor of twenty-five, and the tightest limits sit at small Swiss firms whose forms otherwise look the friendliest. A dossier holding a CV, a cover letter, diplomas and five scanned reference letters passes 10 MB easily if it was scanned in colour.

This is where the official instruction and the practical form pull against each other. arbeit.swiss requires that all documents be compiled into one PDF, with the work references complete and in chronological order, the most recent first. That produces a single large attachment. A form with separate fields is not refusing the instruction; it is asking for the same content in pieces, and the pieces are usually what fits. Where only one field exists, keep the compilation and lower the scan resolution instead.

It is worth noticing who is offering help. Two Swiss application platforms in the index place the tools right beside the upload field: merge several PDFs, compress a PDF, convert Word to PDF, convert an image to PDF. When the receiving side ships a Word-to-PDF converter next to its own file picker, the question of which format it prefers has already been answered by the side that receives your application.

No file format makes an application legally better or worse

A quiet worry persists that an application in the wrong form is somehow invalid, or that a scanned signature makes a PDF binding. Neither is the case. Under Art. 11 para. 1 of the Code of Obligations, contracts require a particular form only where the law prescribes one. For employment the code says it explicitly: under Art. 320 para. 1, unless the law provides otherwise, the individual employment contract requires no particular form to be valid.

If the employment contract itself is free of form requirements, the application that precedes it certainly is. No extension makes it more valid and none makes it void. The signature on a cover letter is a courtesy, not a formal requirement; scanning it, pasting it or leaving it out changes nothing about your legal position.

What does have an effect is duller, and it sits in the same arbeit.swiss checklist as the PDF sentence: before sending or uploading, check spelling and formatting errors, completeness of the documents, and clear and correct file names. Three points, three minutes — and the only part of the format question where you can genuinely gain or lose something.

The short decision rule

If the form says nothing, send PDF. If it lists formats, send the one on the list that is called PDF. If a person asks for an editable file, send the .docx and put the PDF beside it. If a size limit is printed, check the size before you merge rather than after. There is no further rule worth carrying, and everything else is decided by what the CV says, not by how the file ends.