What should I leave off my CV in Switzerland?

Eight rubrics — and the seventh is the one everyone wants to delete

The short answer sits on one official page. arbeit.swiss, run by SECO and the cantons, lists what a CV usually contains: the title «CV», personal details including a photograph, professional experience to date, education and training, language skills, special knowledge or activities, personal interests or hobbies, and references. Eight items, plus one sentence about length: no longer than three pages.

We read that list in all four language versions on 31 August 2026 and set them side by side. It is the same length everywhere and in the same order: eight items in German, eight in French, eight in Italian, eight in English.

What is missing matters more than what is there. We searched both official guides, in every language version, for the details usually nominated for deletion: marital status, religion, denomination, parents, children, the AHV number, primary school, a cover sheet. Not one of those words appears. Deleting them therefore breaks no rule and follows none — there is no rule about them at all.

And the seventh rubric is the one most often recommended for the bin. «Personal interests or hobbies» is in the official list, printed as «persönliche Interessen oder Hobbys» in German, «centres d'intérêt et loisirs» in French and «interessi personali o hobby» in Italian. Cut it if you want to; you are then removing a rubric the federal portal explicitly provides for, on your own judgement rather than on Swiss practice.

Two words from that same page are regularly misfiled. «Signature» appears once, among the formal elements of the covering letter, not the CV. Salary expectations appear only in the interview part of the page — under preparation and under salary negotiation — and never in the CV list. On this guidance neither belongs in the CV — leaving both out is following it, not defying it.

The strict Swiss list is written for fifteen-year-olds — and has no English version

Most of what circulates in English as «the Swiss CV» — put in your date of birth, your place of origin, your nationality, your permit category — traces back to a single page: the CV guidance on berufsberatung.ch, a service of the SDBB on behalf of the cantons. That page names nine elements and is very specific about the personal ones: full date of birth; place of origin, or place of birth if you were born abroad; nationality; and, for foreign nationals, the type of residence permit.

The adult list on arbeit.swiss says two words at the same point: «personal details». It does not say which. Four personal items named on one page, none on the other — that is why the answer you get depends entirely on which page the person answering had read.

The page itself explains the difference. It addresses an apprenticeship candidate: it uses the familiar «du», it talks about the training company, and it carries a rubric for taster apprenticeships and one for school attended rather than work experience. Someone applying for an apprenticeship at fifteen has no employer references and no career to summarise, so the document has to describe the person. It was never written for a professional with ten years behind them.

One sentence from it is still the most precise statement any official Swiss source makes about omission: you may name your family, but it is not obligatory. It is the only place in either guide where an item is expressly labelled optional. The Italian version carries the same sentence. The French version does not — and is the longest of the three, with twelve named elements against nine in German and nine in Italian, adding rubrics for skills, IT knowledge, a «Divers» catch-all and a one-sentence training objective.

The page has no English edition. Its own language links go to German, French and Italian only. So the guidance an English-reading applicant can actually reach is the eight-item adult list — the one that names no personal details whatsoever. If you have been told that a Swiss CV requires a place of origin, note where that requirement is written and who it is addressed to.

A place of origin («Heimatort», «lieu d'origine») is in any case a Swiss legal concept with no equivalent in most countries: the commune a Swiss citizen is registered to by descent, which may be nowhere they have ever lived. If you are not Swiss you do not have one, and the corresponding line on the apprenticeship page tells you to write your place of birth instead.

The line is not taste. It is Art. 28 of the Code of Obligations

Everything above is convention, and conventions can be weighed. What follows is law, and there the line does not run between a long CV and a short one. It runs between staying silent and making a statement.

The Code of Obligations contains no rule about what a CV must say. It does contain a rule about what happens when a contract is obtained by deception. Art. 28 para. 1: «A party induced to enter into a contract by the fraud of the other party is not bound by it even if his error is not fundamental.»

The second provision that belongs here is Art. 24 para. 1 no. 4, which defines when an error is fundamental: «where the error relates to specific facts which the party acting in error considered in good faith to be a necessary basis for the contract». A necessary basis — not every detail a hiring manager would have liked to know.

Between those two provisions lies the practical answer. A line you left out is not a statement about anything; it is not a statement at all. An invented date, a degree you do not hold, an employer you never worked for, a language level nobody ever tested: those are statements, and Art. 28 is about statements. The difference is not the length of the document but whether what is in it is true.

One case sits between the two poles and no general answer resolves it: the omission that makes a different line untrue. Drop an employment and re-date its neighbour so that no interval shows, and you have not stayed silent — you have asserted something. Whether that amounts to deception in a particular case is for a court, not for a guide.

Note also which language of the law binds. Fedlex publishes the Code of Obligations in English, under a standing notice that «English is not an official language of the Swiss Confederation. This translation is provided for information purposes only and has no legal force.» The German, French and Italian texts are the ones that count.

One year from discovery, not from signature

Applicants tend to assume the application is closed once the contract is signed. The law takes a different view, in a provision that is rarely quoted.

Art. 31 para. 1: where the party acting under error, fraud or duress «neither declares to the other party that he intends not to honour the contract nor seeks restitution for the performance made within one year, the contract is deemed to have been ratified». Para. 2 says when that year starts: «The one-year period runs from the time that the error or the fraud was discovered.»

From discovery. A statement noticed in year three opens the year in year three. Para. 3 adds that ratifying a contract made voidable by fraud «does not automatically exclude the right to claim damages».

This is the real reason omission and invention behave so differently over time. An omission ages out. It may prompt a question later, you answer it, and that is the end of it. An untrue statement does not age: it stays in the file the employer keeps, and the clock in Art. 31 only starts when somebody reads it and recognises it for what it is.

This answer deliberately does not predict how a court would decide a particular case. It states what the provisions contain and how they fit together. For an assessment of your own situation, a union, a legal advice centre or a law firm is the right address.

The one item both official lists want kept out of the document

So far, every omission on this page has been your decision. There is one exception, and it concerns information that is not yours in the first place.

The adult list handles references like this: «You should generally note in your CV that references can be provided on request. A separate sheet with referees can also be handed over at the job interview.» A note in the document, and the names later, by hand, to somebody who has already met you.

The apprenticeship list does ask for names and phone numbers in the CV itself, but attaches a condition that appears in all three of its language versions: ask those people first whether they agree. The Italian version puts it as asking for their consent beforehand; the French version recommends checking that they are willing to be listed.

The reason becomes obvious as soon as you count how many copies of a CV exist. Your former manager's mobile number would then sit in every one of them, at every employer, in every application portal — and nobody asked that person whether they wanted to appear in twenty files. This is the one omission the official guidance actively recommends to adult applicants.

The same logic covers everything else about third parties: a client's name in a project line, the company your partner works for, a relative's diagnosis offered as the explanation for a career break. For the break itself there are shorter formulations that concern nobody but you.

What you leave off can reappear in the attachments

A Swiss application is not one document but four: covering letter, CV, work references (Arbeitszeugnisse — the written employer references every departing employee is entitled to), diplomas and certificates. That changes the arithmetic of omission in a way the Anglo-American process simply does not have.

The official guidance demands of the attachments something it never demands of the CV: completeness. In English it says the work references «must not contain any gaps and must be organised chronologically». The French version asks for the references of all posts held, without exception; the Italian one says they must show no gaps; the German one uses the word «lückenlos».

From that follows a plain consistency rule. What you cut from the CV does not leave the dossier if its reference sits in the same PDF. That is not an argument against cutting. It is an argument for checking both halves at once instead of one after the other.

The same structure also relieves the CV of work. It does not have to prove what the attachment already proves. The CV is the table of contents of the dossier, and a table of contents does not improve by repeating the contents.

Four questions to put to every line

First: is the line on the list of eight? Title, personal details, experience, education, languages, special knowledge, interests, references. Anything not on it is optional — not wrong, not forbidden, simply a decision that is yours rather than the guidance's.

Second: does the line answer something the advert asks? A required language, a required qualification, a workload in per cent, the permit question where the role assumes residence in Switzerland. Omit one of those and you have bought yourself a follow-up question — and a follow-up question costs the time in which other files are being read.

Third: is the line information about another person? Then it does not belong in a document you duplicate. It belongs on a separate sheet, handed over later, with that person's agreement.

Fourth: would removing it make another line untrue? If a date only reads correctly because of the deletion, this is no longer an omission but a statement — and statements are the territory of Art. 28.

What survives those four questions is a short document that answers no question nobody asked and leaves no question open that the advert did ask. Everything else — marital status, religion, hobbies, the photograph, the year of birth — is a judgement call, and it is yours to make.