Temporary work on a Swiss CV — assignments, agencies, client companies

Your assignment contract is already a CV line

Temporary agency work is the one Swiss employment form whose contract contents are prescribed item by item. Art. 19 of the Recruitment Act requires a written contract between agency and worker and lists what it must settle: the type of work to be performed, the place of work and the start of the assignment, the duration of the assignment or the notice period, the working hours, the pay including expenses, allowances and social insurance deductions, and the benefits for overtime, illness, maternity, accident, military service and holidays.

Read that list next to a CV row and the mapping is almost mechanical. Type of work becomes the job title, place and start become the location and the first month, duration becomes the last month, working hours become the percentage. Nothing has to be reconstructed from memory — the four facts a Swiss reader wants are already on a piece of paper you were legally entitled to receive.

The second contract runs between the agency and the client. Art. 22 requires it to be written too, and to state the worker's professional qualifications and the type of work, along with the place, the start, the duration or notice periods, the hours and the costs. In other words, the client company was told in writing what it was getting before you walked in. That is the strongest argument for naming the client on your CV: it was a contracting party, not an anonymous location.

The words that travel badly into Switzerland

English-language adverts in the Swiss market use «contract» far more than «temporary»: the word contract appears in 2.3 per cent of English-language adverts and temporary in 0.5 per cent. That gap is a trap for anyone bringing an English CV, because the same word does different jobs in different countries. In Switzerland a temporary assignment is salaried employment with an employer that holds a cantonal licence; the deductions are on your payslip.

The mismatch matters most in the first screening minute. A CV line reading «Contractor, Client AG, 2024–2025» invites two wrong assumptions at once — that you invoiced the client directly, and that no reference letter exists. A line reading «Fixed-term employment via Agency, assignment at Client AG, March 2024 to February 2025» closes both questions before they are asked.

If your CV is in German, French or Italian, use the local term rather than a translation of the English one. The German market writes «befristet» in 2 per cent of its adverts and «temporär» in only 0.3 per cent, so a German-language CV that says «befristete Anstellung» is using the market's own word. French-language adverts favour «temporaire» and «mission»; the statute itself speaks of «location de services».

How long Swiss assignments actually run

Only 7.2 per cent of fixed-term adverts state a duration in months at all. Where they do, the distribution is unusually tight: 47.1 per cent say six months, 19.1 per cent say twelve, 8.8 per cent say nine. The median is six months, and six or twelve months together account for two thirds of all stated durations.

So a six-month row on a CV is not short by Swiss standards — it is the standard unit. What does need half a sentence of context is anything under three months, because that length barely appears in the adverts: holiday cover, a project peak, sickness cover. Name the reason and the row stops looking like an interruption.

Short gaps between assignments have a statutory cause as well. Art. 19 para. 4 allows a notice period of at least two days during the first three months of an open-ended assignment and at least seven days from the fourth to the sixth month. An assignment can therefore end within days, which is why two or three weeks between assignments belongs to the design of this market rather than to your record — and why months, not exact dates, are the right precision for these rows.

Geneva reads your CV differently from Zurich

The language split is also a map. Geneva alone accounts for 19.2 per cent of the fixed-term adverts and Lausanne for 7.9 per cent, while Geneva makes up 4.3 per cent of everything else. Zurich reverses it: 7.6 per cent of fixed-term adverts against 14.2 per cent of the rest. Same federal law, very different local habit.

For an application into French-speaking Switzerland, a run of assignments needs no defensive framing; the reader sees that pattern every week. For an application into German-speaking Switzerland, the same run benefits from one clause per row saying why the assignment existed and what it delivered — not an apology, just the context a rarer form needs.

There is one more asymmetry worth knowing before you decide how much to explain. Fixed-term adverts stay online longer than the rest: a median of 26 days against 19. Assignments are not filled faster than permanent roles, so the weeks between two of your assignments are a property of the market and not evidence of anything about you.

What the sector agreement and the reference letter add

Staffing is the only Swiss sector with a nationwide collective agreement written for this exact employment form. The federal list names the collective agreement for staff leasing with a base decree of 13 December 2011, in force since 1 January 2012 and valid until 31 December 2027, with a territorial scope covering the whole of Switzerland; the most recent amendment took effect on 1 January 2026.

Art. 20 of the Recruitment Act explains why an assignment can generate training entitlements: where the client company falls under a collective agreement that has been declared generally binding, the agency must apply that agreement's pay and working-time provisions, and where it provides for mandatory contributions to continuing education and enforcement costs, those are payable pro rata to the length of the assignment. Courses and certificates that came out of this route belong in the training section of your CV, with the year and the issuing body.

Finally, the reference. Art. 330a of the Code of Obligations gives you the right to request, at any time, a reference covering the nature and duration of the employment as well as your performance and conduct — from the agency, not from the client. Ask for it after each substantial assignment while the people who supervised you are still there, and keep the months on your CV identical to the months on that letter.

Five ways an assignment row goes wrong

Listing the client as the employer. It reads stronger for about a minute, until the reference letter arrives with a different company's letterhead. Naming both from the start removes the contradiction entirely.

Hiding the agency to make the work look independent. Self-employment is a different status with different social insurance consequences, and in an agency relationship the deductions are itemised in your contract. The wrong label contradicts your own salary statement.

Expecting the job title to carry seniority. Only 9.7 per cent of fixed-term adverts contain a seniority word in the title — senior, lead, head, principal, director — against 15.8 per cent of the rest. If your assignment involved responsibility, it has to appear in the bullet lines as team size, budget, systems or volume, because the title will not carry it in this segment.

Dropping the workload. A quarter of fixed-term adverts state a percentage in the title, so a Swiss reader expects one; an assignment row without it silently invites the assumption of full time, which is awkward if the reference says otherwise.

Stretching dates to close the gaps. The cleanest fix is structural, not arithmetic: one agency block with a continuous overall period and the individual assignments as sub-lines underneath. The chronology stays honest and the page stops looking fragmented.