Flexible CV Theming

How to use jsonresume to decouple your CV from its design

How old is your CV Design?

We recommend keeping your CV data uptodate all the time. But how often do you actually update your design? We see tons of CVs with outdated designs or lists of skills that clearly exploded out of their original design.

The biggest reason people let their CV go outdated is that their process of designing their CV is too labor intensive. Maybe their LATEX file is not compiling, or touching up things in InDesign takes forever.

That’s one of the first things we recommend: simplify your cv setup.

Benefits of a simple CV setup

With a simple CV setup it’s easy to update - and more importantly, easy to implement variations for different roles and company profiles.

A typical setup is to have a full on Senior Frontend Engineering CV as well as a Senior Fullstack Developer CV with different emphases in the work experience sections.

The easiest way to achieve this for most people is to use a google doc or similar. But different variations also make it somewhat cumbersome to update all of these variations at the same time.

Structuring your CV data

A way to make it easier to do that is to decouple the actual CV data from the design. JSON Resume is a project to achieve exactly that.

They defined a schema for CV data and there are many different tools working with said schema.

This should make it extremely easy to update the design without having to spend time realigning bullet points and images. You can simply choose a different theme!

Developing your CV locally

It’s pretty easy to setup locally. Just follow the schema in a resume.json. To make it even easier - simply paste the text of your current CV into an agent of your choosing (we tried it out with cursor) and reference the schema, the agent should be able to fill out most of the resume.json correctly.

An easy way to verify if your resume.json is filled in accordingly is running the

npx resumed validate

command if you are using node.

One of the themes that filled most of our criterias was this github-inspired-theme.

Simply follow its documentation and install it. Afterwards you should be able to generate a pdf with

npx resumed export --theme jsonresume-theme-github-styled

Automatic CV deployment

An incredibly convenient thing offered by JSON Resume is their automatic hosting via github.

By simply adding a public gist with your resume.json with your github account, you can share your CV with other developers (or us for a free CV review) by using their registry: https://registry.jsonresume.org/{{YOUR_GITHUB_HANDLE}}

Switching themes in a second

This allows for an extremely fast way of testing out different designs!

Choose any of the officially supported themes and simply append its name as a query parameter to thend of your registry url. For example:

Sadly most of these themes don’t fully support all fields of your resume.json. Some don’t add a profile image while others miss potential references.

Focus on readability

Ultimately your CV is meant to be read. Most likely in the first step not even by a human person. Therefore always make sure that it is being correctly understood by ATS and AI first and foremost.

Again. Keep it as simple as possible. The faster you can show a HR person that you are a qualified match, the more likely it is that you’ll pass their initial screening.

If you are still struggling with getting interviews (or passing them) check out our offerings or contact us directly.