What do I write in the application email itself?
Updated:
In short
Four lines. A subject line naming the job exactly as the advert names it. A salutation using the contact's name if the advert gives one. One sentence saying which vacancy you are applying for and that your complete documents are attached as PDFs. A sign-off with your name, and under it your phone number and email address. No Swiss employer expects more, and the country's only official model application email is built exactly that way.
That model sits on berufsberatung.ch, run by the SDBB on behalf of the cantons, and it is three short elements: a subject line that is the word application plus the job title, a salutation with the recipient's surname, and a single sentence saying the documents for that job are attached, followed by a greeting and the sender's name. It is written for apprenticeship applications, but the structure carries any application: what has arrived, for which job, from whom.
The real work is the subject line, and Swiss job titles make it work. Among active English-language adverts on SwissJobs.app, 29.3 per cent of titles carry something in brackets, 12.6 per cent a gender marker such as (m/f/d) and 9.1 per cent a workload figure. Keep the job designation and the workload, drop the marker: it eats the characters your own name needs.
Active adverts on SwissJobs.app on 22 August 2026, measured on the job title. Language means the language of the advert text.
- Subject line: the word application plus the job designation as the advert writes it, plus the workload figure if there is one. Leave out the gender marker, the marketing suffix and any capitals the advert shouts in. If the advert quotes a reference number, put it at the end — it is almost never in the title itself, which happens in roughly one active advert in a thousand.
- Address a person if the advert names one; otherwise Dear Sir or Madam is the neutral choice. Swiss business German drops the comma after the salutation and the model email shows it, but in English keep the comma — write the email in the conventions of the language you are writing in, not those of the advert's country.
- The one sentence carries three things: the job, the attachment and where you saw the vacancy. Please find attached my complete application for the position of …, advertised on … . Everything about why you are suited belongs in the letter, which travels as its own PDF file.
- Send from an address containing your first name and surname. arbeit.swiss, run by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, states it as a sending requirement: use a reliable email address, ideally containing your first name and surname, and save and send your documents as PDF files.
- Under the sign-off put your name, phone number and email address — nothing else, no postal block. The number is the point of the whole signature: after a good application the next step in Switzerland is often a phone call, and nobody digs through an attachment to find a number.
- Applying part time? Name the workload you want in the sentence. Only 5.5 per cent of active adverts are explicitly flagged as part time, and even among those only 44.1 per cent state the workload in the title. If the advert is silent and you are silent, the question simply moves to the interview.
- Write in the language of the advert. Of the active adverts, 41.6 per cent are written in German, 20.2 per cent in English, 9.7 per cent in French and 1.6 per cent in Italian; for the rest the language could not be determined reliably. An English email answering a German advert is the first evidence about how carefully you read it.
- After about two weeks of silence you may follow up. arbeit.swiss puts it plainly: if you have not had a response for some time, get in touch and politely ask about the status of your application — it shows interest and puts your file back in front of the employer.
The subject line is the only line read before the message is opened
The official model email puts the job title in the subject and nothing else. That sounds easy until you place a real Swiss job title next to it. Across all active adverts on SwissJobs.app the title runs to 40 characters at the median and three quarters stay under 55 — and nearly half of all titles carry a bracketed addition that has nothing to do with the work.
English-language adverts are the tidiest of the four languages, and even they are far from clean: 29.3 per cent of titles have brackets, 12.6 per cent a gender marker, 9.1 per cent a workload figure. Across the whole index the most common marker is (m/w/d) at 19.2 per cent of adverts, followed by (w/m/d) at 4.3 per cent, then (m/f/d), (h/f) and (f/m/d) at around one per cent each — five spellings of the same thing, none of which says anything about you.
So the cut is simple: job designation yes, workload yes, marker no. The workload stays because it is part of the job. Among titles that quote a percentage, roughly 38 per cent say 80–100%, a good quarter say 100% and 6.1 per cent say 80%. Applying to an 80–100% advert with that figure in your subject answers the first question before it is asked.
The second reason for cutting is space. The word application plus the title gives a median subject of 51 characters for English-language adverts, and 32.4 per cent of them run past 60 — more than an inbox list shows, and well more than a phone shows. Send the message to yourself and open it on a phone: whatever you cannot see there, the person holding sixty applications cannot see either.
When the title is not enough: 16.9 per cent of it appears twice
A job title identifies a vacancy less often than you would expect. Among active English-language adverts, 16.9 per cent share their exact title with at least one other active advert from the same employer. Across all languages it is 21.1 per cent, and among Italian-language adverts 34.7 per cent. Software Engineer 80–100% at a large employer can mean four open roles in three offices.
One extra element fixes it: a location or a reference. If the advert quotes a number, put it in the subject. If it does not — and only about one active advert in a thousand carries a reference in the title itself — use the place of work: Application: Software Engineer 80–100%, Zurich office. Your message then lands in the right process without anyone having to ask.
The third option is a link. One line in the body giving the address of the advert you are answering costs nothing and settles the matter for good, which matters most with employers who publish the same role through several channels at once.
What not to do is one email for two vacancies. Two adverts are two processes, often with two people responsible, and an application interested in either of your open positions reads as an application for neither. Send two emails with two subject lines. The letter inside may stay the same if the two roles genuinely describe the same work.
The one sentence, and what it is allowed to carry
The SDBB instruction for applying by email is two sentences long: keep the message short and factual, attach the complete application documents as PDFs. The model text turns that into a single sentence carrying two facts — what is attached and which job it is for. Anything you add should give the reader something the letter does not already say, rather than simply making the sentence longer.
Three additions earn their place. Where you saw the advert, because employers publishing across several channels genuinely want to know. Your earliest possible start date, if it is not obvious from the CV — a three-month notice period is not bad news, but it is news that belongs early. And your target workload, if you are applying part time.
On workload the figures are worth knowing: only 5.5 per cent of active adverts are explicitly flagged part time, and of those 44.1 per cent name a percentage in the title. For everything else the workload is simply open. If you want 60 to 80 per cent, write 60 to 80 per cent — otherwise that becomes the question opening the interview instead of a point already settled.
What does not belong in the body is the letter itself. It is a separate document with formal elements an email cannot carry, and it travels as an attached PDF; that is a question of its own, answered elsewhere in this cluster. For the email it means: no second version of your motivation, no list of your positions, no repeat of the letter's opening line. Write both and you have written twice and persuaded once.
Salutation, sign-off and the three lines underneath
Use the name if the advert gives one. If it does not, Dear Sir or Madam is correct and invisible, and invisible is the goal: in a message of four lines, a creative salutation is instantly the most conspicuous thing in it. Note that the German model email writes Sehr geehrter Herr Keller with no comma and capitalises the next sentence — that is Swiss letter convention, and it is worth copying if you write your email in German.
For the sign-off, Kind regards or Best regards both work in Swiss business English; the German model uses Freundliche Grüsse, the neutral Swiss form. Then your name in full, first name and surname, spelled the same way it is spelled on your CV and in your file names.
Underneath go three lines no template mentions and every recruiter uses: phone number, email address and, if you like, the town you live in. They are there because the next step is a call. arbeit.swiss already requires a reliable sending address ideally containing your first name and surname, so half the signature is written the moment you pick the right account.
Then check the attachment before you send. arbeit.swiss lists three things to check first: spelling and formatting errors, completeness of the documents, and clear and correct file names. The commonest failure in this category is trivial and still costs the application: a carefully written email pointing at an attachment nobody attached.
The message box in a portal — and the email after two weeks
Many applications never take the form of an email at all: they go through a form with a message box. The same text applies there, minus the subject and the signature — salutation, one sentence, sign-off, name. The fields above have already taken your contact details, and repeating them reads as a form somebody filled in twice.
If an automatic acknowledgement comes back, do not reply to it. It is a receipt, not a response. But keep it: it often carries the number your application is filed under, and that number is the best subject line for any later message to that employer.
If about two weeks pass in silence, following up is explicitly foreseen. arbeit.swiss says that if you have had no response for some time you should get in touch and politely ask about the status of your application, which shows a potential employer that you are interested and makes you stand out. The tone is the whole point: an enquiry, not a reminder.
The content is three lines again. Which vacancy you applied for, when you sent the documents, and whether there is any news on the process — plus one sentence saying you remain interested. Like the first email, it needs no extra paragraph, and like the first email it will be read on the day it arrives or not at all.
The market figures come from the adverts active on SwissJobs.app on 22 August 2026 and refer to the job title as the employer wrote it. Brackets, gender markers and workload figures are detected by text patterns, so unusual spellings may be missed and the shares are best read as lower bounds. Same title, same employer means an identical title and an identical company name on at least two active adverts; whether that reflects several roles, several sites or a re-advertised vacancy is not determined here. The language of an advert is the language of its text, not of its place of work; for roughly a quarter of adverts no language could be determined reliably and those are excluded from the language figures. Subject-line lengths are computed as the word application plus the job title. The formal requirements are quoted from arbeit.swiss (SECO) in its English version and from berufsberatung.ch (SDBB), whose model email exists in German, French and Italian and is written for apprenticeship applications. Neither replaces an individual employer's instructions: what the advert asks for always takes precedence.
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What our job index says about the Swiss market
Computed live from our own index, not quoted from a study. Shares only, as of today.
Language the advert is written in
- Deutsch
- 60%
- English
- 23%
- Français
- 13%
- Italiano
- 3%
Of adverts that state a language requirement, the share asking for
- Deutsch
- 70%
- English
- 43%
- Français
- 21%
- Italiano
- 3%
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