What does an ATS actually check — and what do Swiss recruiters check?

The Swiss job portals at a glance

Click an image for the full-size view. What each portal actually is stands beside it.

1. 

   1. SwissJobs.appOur app

   Over 21,000 open Swiss roles from ATS systems, company sites and LinkedIn in one place — and from any advert, straight into a CV, a motivation letter, a CV check and interview prep. The RAV job-search-efforts form fills itself from your application tracker. Free to use; the account is asked for at save.

   SwissJobs.app →

2. 

   2. jobs.ch

   The best-known board in German-speaking Switzerland and the largest index in the country. Owned by JobCloud AG — as are jobup.ch and JobScout24.

   jobs.ch →

3. 

   3. jobup.ch

   The standard in French-speaking Switzerland and the first place to look for the Romandie — but the same JobCloud AG as jobs.ch.

   jobup.ch →

4. 

   4. JobScout24

   A third brand from the same company. Searching all three to widen your search means searching one provider three times.

   JobScout24 →

5. 

   5. Indeed Switzerland

   The broadest aggregation, because Indeed also collects from other boards — at the cost of many duplicates of the same advert.

   Indeed Switzerland →

6. 

   6. LinkedIn Jobs

   The best reputation for English-speaking and international roles in Switzerland. Considerably thinner for trades, care and commercial roles.

   LinkedIn Jobs →

7. 

   7. jobagent.ch

   A meta-search across the Swiss job boards, "every job in Switzerland at a glance". Its strength is the Job-Abo: a saved search that mails you new adverts from every portal it covers. Salary calculator and application guides alongside.

   jobagent.ch →

8. 

   8. SwissDevJobs

   IT and software only, and thorough about it: "183 IT & Software developer jobs in Switzerland", filtered by technology (C#, Java, Python, DevOps, ML) rather than by industry. Publishes salary statistics and lists the companies that disclose their ranges. The site itself is in English.

   SwissDevJobs →

The tools compared directly

As of 4 September 2026. Every figure for another tool comes from that tool's own site; "n/s" means it was not readable there — not that the feature is missing. Our row comes from the code and from walking the live flow.

What the scanners check, in their own words

There is no need to speculate about the method. Jobscan sets out on its own home page what its Match Rate is built from, in a numbered order: hard skills first; then education level, with the qualifier printed right there — "only when an advanced degree is included in the job description"; then job title; then soft skills; then other keywords. Immediately below, it adds that resume word count and measurable results are not factored into the match rate. Read 4 September 2026.

That is a word comparison, and described honestly as one. Two documents are laid side by side, the posting and the CV, and the tool counts which terms appear in one and not the other. Resume Worded does the same under the name Relevancy Score, adding that a score below 80 suggests the CV is missing important skills from the posting. Both statements are about two text files. Neither is a statement about a candidacy.

The marketing around them is less careful. Resume Worded writes that pretty much every company uses screening software and that a CV lacking critical keywords "will be instantly rejected". Jobscan cites 99 per cent of the Fortune 500 and names the systems it has modelled: iCIMS, Recruiterbox, Lever, Greenhouse, Taleo. Those five describe a real market. It is simply not this one — a large share of Swiss postings sit behind vendors that do not appear on that list at all.

And one caveat binds every tool on this page, ours included. Nobody sees inside a given employer's filter settings. What can be stated is a mechanism, not a guarantee: a CV that uses the advert's own vocabulary matches a search for that vocabulary better than a generic one does. Anything beyond that is advertising.

What the Swiss dossier contains — the federal list, and the two surprises in it

For the human half of the question there is an official source. arbeit.swiss, run by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), publishes an English page of application tips setting out what a Swiss application dossier consists of. Read 4 September 2026.

The list is specific. The CV is called the core of the application and should run to no more than three pages. It contains personal details, including a photograph; previous roles; schools and further training; language skills; special skills; interests; and references. It is chronological, most recent first. Work references — Arbeitszeugnisse, the written employer references you receive on leaving each job — must be complete with no gaps and in chronological order, newest on top, and everything is submitted as a single PDF. Even the sender's address gets a line: use a serious email address containing your own name.

Two items reliably catch out people arriving from the UK, the US, Canada or India. First, the photograph: in Switzerland it is conventional and expected, not a liability, and a Swiss CV without one looks incomplete rather than modern. Second, the Arbeitszeugnis: you are expected to hold a written reference from every previous employer and to attach them all, in an unbroken sequence. A gap in that sequence is noticed. There is no equivalent to this in an American application, which is why no international CV tool asks about it.

The third thing worth noticing about that page is an absence. The abbreviation ATS does not appear on it once. We fetched the same page in all four language versions — German, French, Italian and English — and searched each: zero occurrences in every one. The Confederation's own advice to jobseekers does not mention screening software at all.

What the advert itself demands — 502 postings counted

The third source is the strongest, because here the recruiter writes the checklist down. On 4 September 2026 we drew a random sample of open postings from our index, apprenticeships excluded, and read the employer's advert text itself rather than our summary of it. At most three postings count per employer per language, because otherwise a single staffing agency's boilerplate would have become the result. That leaves 502 adverts.

What they ask for, in order of frequency: a language or language level, 54.4 per cent; a formal qualification, 45.8; a workload in per cent, 29.9; a number of years of experience, 23.9; a start date, 13.1; references or work certificates, 7.2; a driving licence, 6.6; a place of residence or proximity to the workplace, 5.0; and a work permit named explicitly, 3.6 per cent.

Now set that beside Jobscan's five priorities. Skills and job title are covered. The qualification is half-covered, because by the vendor's own wording the check applies only when an advanced degree is named — which excludes exactly the commonest Swiss qualification, the EFZ, the federal certificate that follows an apprenticeship and that a large part of this workforce holds. Everything else on the list — language level, workload, start date, driving licence, residence, permit — does not appear in the priorities at all. Nor could it. These are not words to match. They are facts about a person.

71.5 per cent of the counted postings set at least one condition of that second kind; 33.9 per cent set two or more, and 11.6 per cent three or more. In roughly seven Swiss adverts out of ten, a pure keyword comparison cannot assess part of the requirement — not because the tool is poor, but because there is nothing there to compare.

Two dialects of advert — and why imported advice fits one of them

Splitting the count by the language the advert is written in explains why the English-language guidance feels accurate to some readers in Switzerland and absurd to others.

A German-language Swiss posting names a workload 38.9 per cent of the time, a start date 28.0 per cent and a driving licence 10.8 per cent — but a number of years of experience only 12.1 per cent. An English-language posting in the same country inverts that: 52.2 per cent name years of experience, 20.3 per cent a workload, 2.9 per cent a start date and 1.4 per cent a driving licence.

So the English-language advert, even when it is written in Zurich or Zug, follows the shape of an American job posting — and that shape is precisely what the keyword tools were built against. For that segment the imported advice works. The German-language advert asks mostly for things the tool has no field for: 82.2 per cent of German-language postings set at least one such condition, against 59.4 per cent of English-language ones.

This matters most to the reader who has just moved here, because the two dialects map roughly onto two employers. The international firm in Zug advertising in English is running a process the American guides describe. The cantonal hospital, the Gemeinde, the SME in Aargau advertising in German is not. Applying to both with one CV and one mental model is where people lose weeks.

The figure everyone quotes, and what can honestly be said about it

On 4 September 2026 the cvswiss.ch home page carried the sentence: "75% of CVs in Switzerland never reach a human — they get filtered by ATS software." No source is given on the page, and we could not find one.

We are not claiming the number is wrong; establishing that would require seeing inside employers' filters, which nobody can do. What can be said is narrower and still useful. The federal application guidance mentions no screening software in any of its four language versions. A large share of Swiss postings send you to the employer's own address rather than to a vendor. And most solidly: even where software does read first, by its makers' published method it is reading words — while about seven in ten Swiss adverts set at least one condition that is not a word.

The practical consequence is reassuring in one direction and uncomfortable in the other. Reassuring: a CV is rarely discarded for missing a fashionable term. Uncomfortable: the conditions that do sink applications — no workload stated, no permit line, no language levels, a gap in the work references — are printed in the advert in plain language and still go unanswered.

What a checking tool can do with this — and which one to use

Our own check is built along the second list, and that is the difference we will defend. It scores ten categories: seven on content — one of which is ATS and keyword match, alongside hard skills, soft skills, motivation, fit with the working environment, unique selling point and evidenced results — plus a three-part Swiss readiness gate covering work permit and eligibility, languages with an A1–C2 level, and the photograph. The photo is treated as a plus and never as a fault, because here it is the convention. Keyword matching, in other words, is one category of ten rather than the whole examination.

Add a specific posting and the check runs against that posting instead of against a general norm — and because we are a job board as well, you usually do not have to paste the advert in yourself. That is the narrow claim, and it is the true one. The broad claim would be false: cvswiss.ch also puts advert-based tailoring at the centre of its generator, and that deserves saying plainly.

Since 4 September 2026 the first check runs with no account. We verified it on the live site the same day: the first anonymous run returns a report; a second from the same browser answers "Your free check is used — create a free account to run more." One check per browser, then a free account with 5 documents a day and 10 per rolling week, then a 7-day trial, then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, cancellable at any time.

The honest counter-arguments. If you want a number quickly and nothing else, use the free cvswiss.ch check: no account, PDF or DOCX, an instant result — the shortest route to an assessment that exists, at no cost. If you are applying to English-language postings at international employers, Jobscan is the better tool than ours; it modelled exactly the systems used there, and the count above shows the English-language advert really is written in that idiom. If you want line-by-line phrasing feedback on an English CV, Resume Worded gives the sharpest, with the limit stated above its own upload box: "English resumes in PDF or DOCX only." A German, French or Italian CV is not provided for.

For a Swiss advert in German, French or Italian, use ours, because the permit line, the language levels and the Pensum are assessed at all, and because the comparison runs against the specific posting. For anything in English, the others are ahead.

The answer in four sentences

An ATS checker, by its makers' published method, checks words: skill terms, the job title, the qualification when an advanced degree is named, soft skills, remaining keywords.

A Swiss recruiter checks a complete dossier — a CV of no more than three pages, chronological, with a photograph, an unbroken run of work references, language levels, referees — plus the conditions they wrote into the advert themselves.

The second list is longer and the one you can actually verify: 71.5 per cent of counted postings set at least one condition no keyword comparison can assess, rising to 82.2 per cent among German-language adverts.

So the useful order is to answer the advert's questions in the CV first and align the vocabulary second — not the other way round.