What is wrong with my motivation letter?

A letter rarely fails as writing — it fails as a reply

People asking what is wrong with their motivation letter usually expect an answer about language: too long, too stiff, too modest, too many adjectives. In practice, well-written letters fail as reliably as clumsy ones, and at the same point. They are an introduction where a reply was expected.

A job advert is not a requirements list with decoration attached. It is a two-way offer. One half states what is wanted. The other states what is given — and that half is present more often than applicants assume: 39.0 per cent of the English-language adverts we hold carry at least one sentence about what the employer provides. In German-language adverts the same share is 53.7 per cent, so the reader applying in English is working with thinner material and, awkwardly, is the one most likely to fill the gap from the company website.

Use that as the test. Take your letter and mark every sentence that answers something written in the advert. Two or three marks, and the letter is doing its job. One mark — usually the job title in the subject line — and you do not have a badly written text. You have a text without an addressee.

The reason this is so hard to catch yourself lies in the order of writing. Almost everyone writes about themselves first, because that is the part that needs no research, and then scans the advert for hooks to hang the finished sentences on. That order reliably produces a letter in which the advert appears as decoration. Reversed — pick the two or three points of the advert first, then write — the same hour produces a letter that fits this posting and no other.

The offer is in the advert; the company story is not

The weakest paragraph in almost every letter is the one about the employer. It is written like this: open the website, read "About us", find the founding year, the values and the market position, and build a sentence meant to convey appreciation. That sentence is the most interchangeable in the whole letter, because it comes from a source that is identical for every applicant.

The count explains why it is so hard to write. Only 5.2 per cent of English-language Swiss adverts say anything at all about the company as an organisation — size, founding, sites, ownership, market position. In nineteen cases out of twenty the posting in front of you offers no raw material for praise. It offers something else, and more often: a promise.

Those promises are specific enough to answer. Across English-language Swiss adverts, a team or a culture is described in 23.5 per cent, training or development in 6.9 per cent, salary or compensation in 6.5, benefits or employment conditions in 5.5, home office or remote work in 4.2 per cent. Note the shape of that list: the English-language Swiss advert sells the environment far more than the training, which is the reverse of the German-language one, where development leads at 32.1 per cent. Whatever the advert leads with is the vocabulary the employer uses about itself — and a paragraph that answers it cannot appear in anyone else’s letter.

Answering a promise is not thanking someone for it. "I was delighted to see your development opportunities" is another compliment. An answer names what you intend to do with it or what you bring to it: the certification you have started and where it leads, why an annualised-hours model fits your caring commitments, what experience you have of a team that size. A courtesy sentence becomes a checkable one.

And when the advert offers nothing at all — which is the case in 61.0 per cent of English-language postings — the honest move is not to go back to the website for praise, but to drop the paragraph. Three paragraphs that all answer the posting beat four where one came off the internet.

What the letter is officially for — and the two questions behind it

There is an official description of what a Swiss cover letter should do, and it is remarkably narrow. arbeit.swiss, run by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, names three things: the letter gives a potential employer an overview of your skills, your qualifications and your motivation for an advertised position.

The load-bearing words are the last two. Not motivation in general, not enthusiasm for the profession, but motivation for an advertised position. Anything in your letter that would read identically for any other posting in the same trade does not meet that definition.

The same official page gives away the questions behind it in a completely different section. Preparing for the interview, it lists the typical employer questions, among them, word for word: "Why are you looking for work? Why this job? Why at this company?" Those are precisely the three questions your letter answers in advance. A letter that does not answer them is not wrong; it has simply not been written yet.

Equally telling is what none of the official descriptions contains: no length, no style, no number of paragraphs, no prescribed phrasing. The formal elements are listed — your postal address, the company address, the date, a subject heading, the salutation, the closing greeting and the signature — and everything after that is content. Anyone polishing the prose for the fourth time is working on the part for which no standard exists.

The letter repeats the dossier instead of adding to it

A Swiss application file is an evidence file, and that is the single biggest difference from the American or British cover letter. arbeit.swiss expects the Arbeitszeugnisse — the written employer references every Swiss employee is entitled to — complete, gapless and in reverse-chronological order, assembled in one PDF, alongside diplomas and certificates. The CV runs up to three pages and is expected to have no unexplained gaps.

That changes what the letter is for. In a market where you attach references, your qualities are documented before you assert them. "I am reliable and a good team player" competes with a reference in which a former manager wrote something similar and signed it. The letter never wins that comparison; it can only add what the documents do not contain.

Which is close to a definition of a good Swiss letter: why you are moving, what you are looking for in this specific work, how you meet the requirement your CV does not display at a glance, from when and at what workload you are available, and what you would do with what the employer offers in the posting. None of that is in a reference, and nobody else can answer it for you.

If you are applying from abroad, one more line belongs here rather than anywhere else: your permit situation stated plainly. But state it on page one of the CV as well — "based in Zurich, B permit, no sponsorship required" — because that is where it is looked for, and a permit fact hidden in the third paragraph of a letter is a fact that arrives too late.

The corresponding subtraction is the prose retelling of the CV. It is the commonest filler in the middle of a letter and the one paragraph a reader is guaranteed to have already seen, in a structured form, one page further on. Cutting it frees exactly the space for the two paragraphs that were missing.

How much material you get depends on the trade

Answering the employer’s offer is not equally easy in every field, and that is measurable rather than impressionistic. Among the English-language Swiss adverts we hold, sales postings carry a promise in 47.0 per cent and hospitality in 45.6 per cent, while IT and engineering postings do so in 35.8 per cent.

That last figure matters because English-language adverts in Switzerland are heavily concentrated in IT, engineering, pharma and finance — so the reader most likely to be applying in English is also the one most likely to face an advert that promises nothing. The method stays the same; the material changes.

Where there is a promise, answer it. Where there is none, take the work itself: the first task listed, the size or composition of the team, the tool or system named explicitly, the site, the shift or on-call arrangement. Those details also exist in this posting only, and a paragraph about them does the same job as one about training.

One case is worth naming separately: adverts placed by staffing agencies. There the offer is usually the agency’s offer rather than the client’s, and the actual employer is not named at all. Praise for the company is then not merely weak but impossible, and a letter that attempts it shows that the posting was not read to the end.

What is probably not wrong with your letter

The length. One A4 page is the Swiss convention, and none of the official descriptions prescribes a word count. A letter that fits on one page and answers nothing does not improve by being cut. A letter that answers gets no worse for five more lines.

The template. Nobody can see that your letter came from a template. What they can see is that it would suit any employer. That distinction has a practical consequence: the frame may stay, the answers must change.

That you used a tool. Even the cantonal careers-guidance service now explicitly suggests having the letter corrected by an AI, with one condition: remove personal details first and do not upload confidential documents. What gets judged is the content, not the instrument.

The missing contact name. Where the advert names nobody, the formal salutation is the intended solution rather than a fallback. And a single typo does not cost an interview, whereas a contradiction between the letter and the CV can.

And the hardest point: sometimes nothing is wrong with the letter and the rejection arrives anyway. If you do not hold the permit, do not reach the language level stated in the advert or lack the required qualification, the decision happened at a threshold that sits before the letter. The answer then is not a better letter but a different selection of postings.

The one paragraph worth changing

If you change a single thing in one letter, change this: replace the paragraph about the employer with a paragraph about what the employer offered, or named as the first task, in this posting. It is the same length, costs the same time, and is the only paragraph nobody else could write.

The test needs no second reader. Cover the company name and the job title in your own letter and read it again. If it is still obvious which posting this is, the letter has done its work. If it is not, you already know which paragraphs to replace.

This effort does not pay off equally everywhere. Twenty applications to jobs that genuinely fit beat two hundred to jobs that roughly fit — not because diligence is rewarded, but because a letter can only decide where the hard requirements are met already. The letter chooses among suitable applications; it never establishes suitability.