What does a professional CV review cost?

Three counters sell the same hour

If you arrive in Switzerland and search in English for someone to look over your CV, you will find agencies. What you will not find, because it does not buy advertising, is the public service that does the same job in every canton — and in several of them does it for nothing.

Counter one is the cantonal career-guidance office, the Berufs-, Studien- und Laufbahnberatung, known as BIZ in German-speaking cantons and OCOSP or UOSP in the French- and Italian-speaking ones. Each canton sets its own fee and publishes it. Counter two is the unemployment insurance: if you are registered with a regional employment centre, the RAV, the advice comes through them and you are not the one paying. Counter three is the private market, which sells written dossiers by the document and delivers in days.

The spread between counter one and counter three is larger than the spread between any two private providers. Comparing three agencies against each other and calling the result "the market price" measures only the most expensive third of the market.

The cantonal fee schedule, canton by canton

These pages are public and unusually specific about money. Zurich charges CHF 80 for a first session of at most 60 minutes and CHF 170 for every further hour, with tests billed by effort. Bern gives the entry session away — its LaufbahnKlärung is described as a free introductory conversation — then charges CHF 120 per 60-minute session, or CHF 1200 for a package of two sessions with formal testing and a written evaluation.

Schaffhausen inverts the order: adults resident in the canton get up to three hours of guidance free, and only «ab dem 4. Beratungsgespräch» does a charge of CHF 150 for up to three further hours appear. Aargau, through ask!, is the priciest in this comparison at CHF 180 an hour excluding VAT, and offers two fixed packages, CHF 720 for two sessions and CHF 920 for three.

Then there are the cantons that abolished the fee. Zug states its offering is free for residents. Lucerne states both of its guidance formats are free of charge. Ticino charges CHF 80 an hour to working adults who have completed an initial qualification, and its counsellors help you «preparare o migliorare il dossier di candidatura» — prepare or improve the application dossier. Vaud publishes no adult tariff at all — the only thing it labels free in so many words is viamia — and lists «la relecture de CV», CV proofreading, among the personal support its information centres give.

One practical consequence for newcomers: the service is tied to where you live and pay tax, not to your passport. Geneva's Cité des métiers is explicit that its free adult career review «n'est toutefois accessible qu'aux personnes qui sont contribuables dans le canton de Genève» — open only to Geneva taxpayers. Residency, not nationality, is the gate.

Over 40, or registered with the RAV: the price is already settled

Two large groups never need to compare prices at all. viamia addresses everyone over 40 and offers a free personal career review; the French-language page records that from 2026 the cantons carry the funding and the rollout themselves. It is not a stripped-down version of a paid service — it is the same cantonal counsellor. One condition comes from viamia itself: the free session is meant for people who cannot claim comparable support from the unemployment insurance, the disability insurance or social assistance.

If you are registered as unemployed, the rule is statutory rather than promotional. Article 59 paragraph 1 of the Unemployment Insurance Act reads: «Die Versicherung erbringt finanzielle Leistungen für arbeitsmarktliche Massnahmen zu Gunsten von versicherten Personen und von Personen, die von Arbeitslosigkeit bedroht sind.» — the insurance provides financial benefits for labour-market measures. Article 60 defines training measures as individual or collective courses for retraining, further training or reintegration, which is where application courses sit.

The cantonal side confirms the same thing from the other direction: Zurich lists jobseekers referred by the RAV among the cases it does not charge, because the RAV covers the cost. arbeit.swiss points to the same route for personal support with your applications. This is an explanation of the rule, not advice on using it: the competent cantonal office decides on participation, the procedure sits in Article 59c of the Act, and practice differs by canton. What your own RAV will approve is a question for your own RAV.

What the Swiss private market charges

The private counter does not bill hours; it bills documents. Bewerbungsbox charges CHF 140 for a German dossier — cover letter, CV and cover sheet — with two correction rounds, delivered in two to three days. Bewerbungsmeister lists an individually written CV from CHF 249 and delivery in two to four working days. Bewerbungshelfer advertises a professionally written application from CHF 129. Nexaria charges CHF 290 for trainees and apprenticeship leavers, CHF 490 for administrative and assistant roles and CHF 690 for specialists and managers, with two to three correction rounds and four to six working days of turnaround.

Note what those prices are for. They are almost all writing services, not review services. If what you want is a verdict on the dossier you already have, the German-speaking providers will usually sell you a rewrite along with it. The exception sits in French-speaking Switzerland, where at least one provider sells the two apart: CHF 49 for an «Analyse de CV» against CHF 179 for a full rewrite. Assessment on its own — read it, judge it, do not rewrite it — is what the cantonal counter does by default.

International brands add a second complication that the Swiss providers do not: they bill in dollars or euros, so what leaves your Swiss account depends on the day's rate and on what your card charges for foreign currency.

The second-language surcharge: what it actually buys

A second language version costs between CHF 70 and CHF 100 at the providers checked here. Whether that is worth paying has nothing to do with the price and everything to do with how much of the open market is written in that language. That part is measurable.

Nationally, among adverts whose language can be identified, 57.1 per cent are in German, 27.1 per cent in English, 13.5 per cent in French and 2.2 per cent in Italian. For an English speaker that is the single most useful number on this page: an English-only dossier addresses a bit over a quarter of the market, and the surcharge that matters for you is the German one, not the English one.

Regionally the picture changes completely. In Geneva 54.6 per cent of adverts are written in English against 43.2 per cent in French — the only major canton where English is the majority advert language. Zurich runs 56.1 per cent German to 43.0 per cent English, and Zug is almost exactly balanced at 49.7 to 50.3. Aargau, an hour from Zurich, is 87.3 per cent German and 11.6 per cent English. The same CHF 70 surcharge buys eight times as much reach in Zug as it does in Aargau.

So the question the price page cannot answer is which canton you are applying into. In Vaud, 68.7 per cent of adverts are in French; in Ticino, 75.4 per cent are in Italian; in Neuchâtel the split is 54.0 per cent French, and English and Italian tie at 21.8 per cent each.

The express surcharge: what it actually buys

The other surcharge is speed — CHF 80 to turn two or three days into twenty-four hours. That sounds like a race until you look at how quickly the stock you are applying into actually moves.

The median open advert is 20.6 days old. Only 0.6 per cent of open adverts were posted in the last three days, 13.1 per cent within the last week and 36.4 per cent within the last fortnight, while 16.4 per cent have been open for more than three months. Saving two days therefore adds a fraction of one per cent to the set of adverts you can reach — unless there is one advert with one deadline, in which case the surcharge is worth every franc.

Speed is also regional. The median open advert is 19.0 days old in the German-speaking cantons, 27.3 days in the French-speaking ones and 64.9 days in Ticino. A dossier written once keeps its usefulness far longer in Lugano than in Zurich, and an express fee is worth correspondingly less there.

Per dossier or per advert: the unit that decides the price

The commonest mistake in comparing these prices is the unit. The cantonal tariff is a price per hour; the private price is a price per document; but the thing you consume is a price per application, and applications come in quantity.

The open market is highly fragmented. 45.4 per cent of employers have exactly one advert open, and the ten largest employers together account for 21.4 per cent of all adverts. There is no short list of destinations that would justify a single perfect document; there is a very long list of employers with one job each. Among adverts that name a language requirement at all, 27.8 per cent name two or more, so even inside one language region the dossier is rarely written only once.

That leads to a plain calculation. A CHF 490 package is either a one-off purchase aimed at a single job you badly want, or it is a base that you then adapt yourself for each advert. Both are defensible, but only the second makes the price reasonable across a whole search — and it assumes you can do the adapting afterwards.

What we charge, for the record

Our own position belongs on a page about price. Checking a CV against a specific open advert is part of the free account: an email address, no card. What is paid for here is the layer above it — the detailed check, same-day matches and alerts — at CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, an effective CHF 7.92 a month, with 7 days free at the start.

So we sell something too, and what we sell is automated rather than personal. What an automated check cannot do is sit across from you and ask why the gap between two jobs happened, or how you would explain a change of field out loud. That is what the cantonal counter is for, and in several cantons it costs nothing.

Three questions to ask before you pay

First: review or rewrite? An assessment of the dossier you have and a newly written dossier are two products with very different prices. If you only want to know what is not working, you do not need the expensive one.

Second: measured against what? Against a general template, against the reviewer's own experience, or against a specific open advert. Only the third answers the question you actually have, which is whether this document is enough for this job.

Third: what does the second round cost? Public offices publish the price of a further hour; private packages state how many correction rounds are included — two at Bewerbungsbox, two to three at Nexaria. After that, everything depends on what you can do yourself.