Which file format gets through an ATS?

File formats and how they are parsed

PDF and .docx are both safe as long as the text is real text. The most common actual failure is not the format but a scanned document, or one exported as an image. When in doubt, follow what the advert asks for.

The advice you have read was written for a different market

If you have applied for jobs in the United States or read an English-language guide, you have probably been told to send a .docx because applicant systems parse Word more reliably than PDF. That advice is a decade old and it does not describe what Swiss forms ask for today. In our retrieval, Word was optional in nine of twenty configurations and absent altogether from those nine, whereas PDF was on every list. Sending a Word file is a bet that the employer is in the eleven; sending a PDF is not a bet.

The English-language corner of the Swiss market is also where the imported advice is least wrong, which is worth knowing if you are applying from abroad. English adverts are far more likely than German or French ones to route into an applicant system, and the vendors behind them are the familiar international names rather than the Swiss ones. So an English-speaking applicant genuinely does meet more software than a French-speaking one does. Even there, though, the form itself asks for PDF: Greenhouse, one of the most common systems behind English-language Swiss adverts, prints "Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf" directly under the upload button, and PDF leads that list.

What we actually did, and what we could not see

We took application addresses from the open Swiss adverts we hold and opened more than two hundred of them: several per vendor, the employer career sites carrying the most adverts, plus separate samples for French-language, Italian-language and Ticino adverts and for staffing agencies. For each page we recorded what the page itself discloses about permitted file types — the upload field, or the sentence printed beside it. Thirty-five pages disclosed something; collapsing identical vendor setups leaves twenty distinct configurations.

The honest limitation is that pages which build their form in the browser reveal nothing to a simple retrieval, and several large systems work that way. So this is not a random sample of Swiss employers; it is the readable part, and it leans towards vendors whose forms render server-side. That is also why we report the pattern rather than a national percentage. Within the readable part the pattern is uniform enough to be useful: PDF twenty out of twenty, Word eleven, and zero configurations that take Word but refuse PDF.

The text layer is the whole game

We produced one invented CV — an accounts clerk in Winterthur, with profile, experience, education, languages, skills and interests — as seven separate files, then pushed each through the same libraries our own CV import uses to pull text out of an upload.

The PDF printed from a browser gave back the whole document: all six section headings, all seven test markers, umlauts intact, including the "Bewilligung C" line that a Swiss CV carries and a foreign one does not. The .docx and the legacy .doc did the same. The PDF containing nothing but an image of that same page gave back twelve characters, and they came from a page marker rather than from the CV. RTF, plain text and JPG our importer refuses outright, even though several of the forms we checked would happily accept them.

So the practical test is not "PDF or Word", it is "can this file be selected". Open your PDF and try to highlight a line of text with the mouse. If the text highlights, there is a text layer and any parser can read it. If nothing highlights, your CV is a picture — fine for a human on a screen, empty for anything automatic. Export from the program you wrote it in; never print, scan and re-upload.

Size, and the Swiss dossier that causes it

A Swiss application is not a resume plus a cover letter. It is a Bewerbungsdossier: CV, letter, Arbeitszeugnisse — the written references every previous Swiss employer issues you — and diplomas. Those arrive as scans, and scans are what collide with the upload limit. The ceilings we found ran from 5 MB to 50 MB, with 10 MB common. Our text CV page weighed roughly 76 KB; the same page as an image weighed roughly 106 KB at coarse resolution, 217 KB at medium and 479 KB at fine. Ten finely scanned reference pages therefore hit the 5 MB ceiling that the largest French-language application host in our index applies.

Two Swiss hospital groups solve this in the form itself and say so in writing: upload the CV, diplomas and references as PDF, and feel free to combine everything into one single PDF. That is the instruction coming from the employers, not from us. Scan references at a resolution that is legible rather than archival, keep the CV as an exported PDF with its text layer, and merge only when the form gives you a single field.

What the browser claims your file is

A failure mode we know from running our own upload: what a browser reports as the file type is frequently wrong. When a file comes from a download folder or a cloud drive, browsers routinely announce an indeterminate type, and a form that trusts that announcement will reject a perfectly valid document. Our own importer therefore reads the first bytes of the file — a PDF starts with %PDF, a .docx is a zip archive underneath, a legacy .doc has its own signature — and only then looks at the name. Not every form does this.

Two consequences. Renaming a file does not convert it: a Word document called CV.pdf is still a Word document and will be caught either at upload or when someone opens it. And if an upload fails for no visible reason although your format is on the list, re-exporting the file usually works better than renaming it. While you are there, give it a name a human can find in a folder of thirty attachments — surname, first name, CV. Nobody has ever been helped by Document1.pdf.

What we can and cannot claim

Nobody can promise you that a file will "get through an ATS", and any vendor quoting you a pass rate is quoting a number it has no way to check. We see these forms from the outside; we do not see the rules configured behind them, and an employer can change a setting tomorrow. What we can show is narrower and still useful: across every Swiss application form where we could read the list, PDF was permitted; Word was permitted about half the time; and a PDF without a text layer yields nothing to any parser regardless of how it looks.

If you are rebuilding the CV anyway, our CV builder exports a PDF with a text layer — we ran that export through the same extraction for this answer and got the full text back. And because we already hold the Swiss adverts themselves, you can write the CV against a specific advert instead of pasting the posting in first.