How to write a Swiss motivation letter that gets read

Updated: 5 September 2026

In short

A Swiss motivation letter is rarely read straight through — it is sampled. To be read further, the top half has to deliver three things: which advert you are answering, two claims about yourself that can be checked inside the same application file, and your availability as a workload percentage and a date. So write the middle first and the opening last, and keep the whole thing on one A4 page. This guide walks the seven steps.

Two decisions come before the first sentence, and both are made from the advert rather than from any style guide: who opens the letter, and which language it has to be in. In our count of the open Swiss adverts, 65.7 per cent of postings sit with employers who have ten or more roles open at the same time. That letter lands on a desk running a dozen parallel processes. In the remaining third it lands with the person who will actually work with you.

The language decision is the one that most often goes wrong for people arriving from outside Switzerland. In the German-speaking cantons, English alone satisfies the stated language requirement in 18.5 per cent of adverts; in the Romandie it is 29.6 per cent, in Ticino 21.7. An advert written in English is not the same thing as a workplace that runs in English — and the letter follows the requirement, not the advert text.

The rest is craft, and there is not much of it: one page, four paragraphs, two evidenced claims, a closing block with workload and start date. What this guide really gives you is the order of work. Most letters fail not on style but on having been written back to front.

Where English is enough — and where it is only half the requirement

Share of open Swiss adverts that state a language requirement, by region, 5 September 2026. Multiple languages per advert are possible.

In short: work out who opens the letter first. Across Switzerland, 65.7 per cent of open adverts sit with employers running ten or more vacancies at once.
In short: write in the language the advert requires, which is not always the language it is written in. English alone is enough in 18.5 per cent of adverts in the German-speaking cantons.
In short: state a level, not an adjective. Of all stated language requirements, 79.2 per cent are set at professional level — "good German" does not answer that.
In short: write the two evidence paragraphs first. Every claim needs something in the same file that proves it — an Arbeitszeugnis (the Swiss employer reference), a diploma, a named project.
In short: two facts can only come from you — your Pensum (workload in per cent) and your earliest start date. They belong in the closing block, as a number and a date.
In short: the official pre-send check has three items — spelling and formatting, completeness of the documents, and clear unambiguous file names. Everything goes as PDF.
In short: if you are registered with an RAV, an application only counts once it is recorded where your RAV requires it. No tool replaces that step.

1. Work out who opens the letter

Before writing a line, decide which of two worlds this letter is going into. In our count of the open Swiss adverts, 65.7 per cent sit with employers who have ten or more roles open simultaneously. The share is highest in the German-speaking cantons at 65.3 per cent and clearly lower in the French-speaking cantons at 50.3 and in Ticino at 48.5. So in the German-speaking market, two letters in three go to a desk that is running many processes at once.

That does not change what you write, but it changes the weighting. Where many processes run in parallel, the letter is first sorted and only then read: the subject line and the first two lines have to say which advert you are answering without the reader having to work it out. Where an employer has a single vacancy open, the reader is most likely the person you would work with — and there the paragraph about the actual task carries further than any formal polish.

How to tell them apart: look at how many roles the same employer currently advertises, and where the application link goes. A career portal with dozens of open positions is the first world; an email address with a first and last name in it is the second. Both are in the advert and cost you two minutes.

2. Decide the language before the first sentence

The letter goes in the language the job requires. That is not automatically the language the advert is written in, and this is the trap that catches people applying from abroad hardest. In the German-speaking cantons, 79.5 per cent of adverts that state a language requirement ask for German and 44.3 per cent for English; English alone satisfies the requirement in 18.5 per cent. In the Romandie, French is required in 62.3 per cent and English in 55.7; English alone is enough in 29.6 per cent. In Ticino, Italian is required in 71.7 per cent and English in 38.6.

The working rule: if the advert names one language, write in it. If it names two, write in the language of the workplace and evidence the second one inside the text — one sentence in which it appears or is documented is enough. If it names none, which is the case for about a third of adverts, write in the language of the advert text.

And give a level rather than a feeling. Of all the language requirements stated in the adverts we hold, 79.2 per cent are set at professional level, 16 per cent at conversational, 3.5 per cent at native and 1.2 per cent at basic. The answer to a requirement like that is "German B2, French A2". "Good language skills" is not an answer, and in a market that writes CEFR levels into its adverts it reads as an evasion.

3. Pull five lines out of the advert before you write

The Swiss cantonal careers service opens its adult application guidance with a single instruction: check the advert for which documents are asked for, and where nothing specific is stated, submit an application or motivation letter, a CV, and your employer references and qualifications. That is the whole file, and it is the reason the letter does not have to carry everything. It is one document of three.

So pull five lines out of the advert before you compose anything. First, the job title exactly as advertised. Second, the two requirements you can evidence best — not all of them, two. Third, the one sentence in which the employer promises something you want to answer. Fourth, your workload and earliest start. Fifth, the required language and its level. Those five lines are the letter; everything else is phrasing.

What you are not looking for is the company history. The "why this employer" paragraph works better when it answers a sentence of the advert than when it summarises the website — and the reader spots the difference immediately, because they wrote one of those texts and not the other.

4. Write the middle first: two claims, two pieces of evidence

The part that actually gets read is the two evidence paragraphs in the middle. Each is a claim plus its proof: what you can do, and where it can be checked inside the same file. The proof is not an adjective, it is the Arbeitszeugnis, the diploma, the named responsibility, the project with a name and a period. A sentence with no proof behind it is a genuine risk in a Swiss application, because the employer references travel with the file and a contradiction shows up there.

Two paragraphs, not five. The limit is arithmetic rather than taste: on an A4 page carrying sender address, recipient address, date, subject line, salutation, closing formula and signature, a little under half the page is left for body text. Squeeze in three more claims and each one shrinks to an assertion — and assertions are exactly what does not travel in this market.

Use the nouns of the advert rather than your own synonyms. If it says "accounts receivable", write accounts receivable. This is not keyword optimisation, it is sorting: the person reading has the requirement list in their head and is ticking it off.

5. Only then the subject line, salutation and close

The formal parts come last because they follow from the middle. arbeit.swiss, run by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, lists exactly these elements for the letter: your postal address, the company address, date, subject heading, opening salutation, closing greeting and signature. The same page sets no length for the letter — only for the CV, which should not run beyond three pages.

The closing block carries the two facts nobody but you can supply: your Pensum as a number and your earliest start date as a date. "Immediately available" is simply wrong for most employees, because a notice period is running; a date is information, "by arrangement" is not. And the closing sentence asks for an interview — it does not promise enthusiasm.

On the salutation: if the advert names a person, use their name. If it does not, the formal plural address is the intended form rather than a fallback, and the recipient block may carry the responsible department — Human Resources, Personaldienst, nursing management — instead of a person.

6. Cut to one page and run the traceability test

The test worth three minutes: go sentence by sentence and write in the margin what each sentence answers — a line of the advert, a document in the file, or a fact only you can supply. Sentences with an empty margin come out. In practice that is usually the opening about your enthusiasm and the penultimate paragraph that retells the CV.

Then the official pre-send check, exactly as arbeit.swiss sets it out: spelling and formatting errors, completeness of the documents, and correct, unambiguous file names. Send as PDF, from a serious email address that ideally contains your first and last name. The file name is the most-skipped item on that list and the cheapest to fix: "Application_Meier_Anna_Accounts_Receivable.pdf" can be found again in an inbox; "cover_letter_final_v3.pdf" cannot.

Keep the editable version. That is also what the cantonal careers service advises: send the PDF, keep the word-processor file, and adapt a copy for the next application. The letter that still reads well on the twentieth application is rarely the freshly written one — it is the carefully adapted one.

7. Send it the way the advert asks — and record it

The application route is in the advert and it is more binding than any recommendation: a form is a form, an email address is an email address. If the portal has a field for the letter, the letter goes in it; an empty field is an answer, and not a good one. If there is no field, the letter becomes the first page of the PDF that carries the file.

If you are registered with an RAV, one more step applies, and it is the only one in this guide where a mistake costs money: your job-search efforts count only once they are recorded where your RAV requires them — in Job-Room or on the federal form the unemployment insurance provides for it. An application tool can fill the form for you; it cannot replace the recording. Whether a given effort counts in your case is decided by your RAV alone.

Then the obvious thing: note the date. Swiss adverts almost never carry an application deadline, but they do carry a publication date — and following up factually and politely after two or three weeks is precisely what arbeit.swiss explicitly recommends.

What people report

Recruiters working in Switzerland say openly that the motivation letter is not read by every recruiter or hiring manager — and in the same breath advise sending one with every application and customising it, because with the readers who do read it, it can make the difference. The letter is therefore not a box to tick but a document with uncertain and high leverage.
A public LinkedIn post from January 2026 by a recruiter working in Switzerland, who bases the advice on seven years of career events and conversations with recruiters across the country; summarised as a pattern, not quoted.
The same practitioner accounts give one simple language rule: CV and letter in the language of the job posting — German, French, Italian or English. Our own count adds the point where that rule falls short: the language an advert is written in and the language the job requires come apart regularly, and English-language adverts in the German-speaking cantons are the clearest case.
The same January 2026 post, summarised as a pattern; the qualification comes from our own count of the open Swiss adverts on 5 September 2026.

The market figures were counted on 5 September 2026 across the open Swiss adverts we hold. Apprenticeships, internships and trainee programmes are excluded on the job title and account for 6.5 per cent of rows. Language shares refer only to those adverts that state a language requirement at all — 66.1 per cent of the remaining adverts; for 87.4 per cent of those the workplace could be resolved to a canton. Adverts can state several languages, so the shares do not sum to a hundred. The figures on simultaneously open vacancies per employer are grouped on the employer name, so spelling variants of the same house count as two employers, and staffing intermediaries are among the advertisers — both push the measured concentration down rather than up. We publish shares and ratios, never absolute stock figures. The official statements come from the "tips on applying for jobs" page of arbeit.swiss (SECO) and from the SDBB cantonal careers guidance, both read on 5 September 2026; there is no English version of the cantonal careers page, so the German and French versions are cited.

Cover letter for Switzerland: from this advert, free

Sources

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%

19% posted in the last 7 days · Largest markets: Zürich 18% · Bern 10% · Genève 5% · Basel 5%