LinkedIn Profile to JSON Resume Browser Tool

An extremely easy-to-use browser extension for exporting your full LinkedIn Profile to a JSON Resume file or string.

Chrome Extension 📦 - Webstore Link

My LinkedIn Profile 👨‍💼 - linkedin.com/in/joshuatzucker/

What is JSON Resume?

"JSON Resume" is an open-source standard / schema, currently gaining in adoption, that standardizes the content of a resume into a shared underlying structure that others can use in automated resume formatters, parsers, etc. Read more about it here, or on GitHub.

What is this tool?

I made this because I wanted a way to quickly generate a JSON Resume export from my LinkedIn profile, and got frustrated with how locked down the LinkedIn APIs are and how slow it is to request your data export (up to 72 hours). "Install" the tool to your browser, then click to run it while looking at a LinkedIn profile (preferably your own), and my code will grab the various pieces of information off the page and then show a popup with the full JSON resume export that you can copy and paste to wherever you would like.

A Note About Feature Requests and Bug Reports

I want to make something clear: the only goal of this extension is to be able to export a JSON Resume version of your LinkedIn profile; nothing more, nothing less.

If the tool is malfunctioning or could do a better job of exporting JSON Resume, by all means please open an issue - I always appreciate it!

However, I have gotten several feature requests (as both issues and emails) asking me to extend the tool to do things that are far outside this goal. While I appreciate the interest, ultimately I am not interested in having this project grow outside the original scope - you will usually see me close this issues as wontfix and will reply to emails the same way. I have limited time, and this project was originally something I whipped up in a few days for personal use - it has already gotten way out of scope 😅

Breaking Change - v1.0 Schema Update

The 10/31/2021 release of this extension (v3.0.0) changes the default shape of the JSON exported by this tool, to adhere to the newer v1 schema offered by JSON Resume:

Usage / Installation Options:

There are (or were) a few different options for how to use this:

• Fast and simple: Chrome Extension - Get it here
  • Feel free to install, use, and then immediately uninstall if you just need a single export
  • No data is collected
• [Deprecated] (at least for now): Bookmarklet
  • This was originally how this tool worked, but had to be retired as a valid method when LinkedIn added a stricter CSP that prevented it from working
  • Code to generate the bookmarklet is still in this repo if LI ever loosens the CSP

Schema Versions

This tool supports multiple version of the JSON Resume Schema specification for export, which you can easily swap between in the dropdown selector! ✨

"Which schema version should I use?"

If you are unsure, you should probably just stick with "stable", which is the default. It should have the most widespread support across the largest number of platforms.

Support for Multilingual Profiles

LinkedIn has a unique feature that allows you to create different versions of your profile for different languages, rather than relying on limited translation of certain fields.

For example, if you are bilingual in both English and German, you could create one version of your profile for each language, and then viewers would automatically see the correct one depending on where they live and their language settings.

I've implemented support (starting with v1.0.0) for multilingual profile export through a dropdown selector:

The dropdown should automatically get populated with the languages that the profile you are currently viewing supports, in addition to your own preferred viewing language in the #1 spot. You should be able to switch between languages in the dropdown and click the export button to get a JSON Resume export with your selected language.

Note: LinkedIn offers language choices through a Locale string, which is a combination of country (ISO-3166) and language (ISO-639). I do not make decisions as to what languages are supported.

This feature is the part of this extension most likely to break in the future; LI has some serious quirks around multilingual profiles - see my notes for details.

Export Options

There are several main buttons in the browser extension, with different effects. You can hover over each button to see the alt text describing what they do, or read below:

• LinkedIn Profile to JSON: Converts the profile to the JSON Resume format, and then displays it in a popup modal for easy copying and pasting
• Download JSON Resume Export: Same as above, but prompts you to download the result as an actual .json file.
• Download vCard File: Export and download the profile as a Virtual Contact File (.vcf) (aka vCard)
  • There are some caveats with this format; see below

vCard Limitations and Caveats

• Partial birthdate (aka BDAY) values (e.g. where the profile has a month and day, but has not opted to share their birth year), are only supported in v4 (RFC-6350) and above. This extension currently only supports v3, so in these situations the tool will simply omit the BDAY field from the export
  • See #32 for details
• The LinkedIn display photo (included in vCard) served by LI is a temporary URL, with a fixed expiration date set by LinkedIn. From observations, this is often set months into the future, but could still be problematic for address book clients that don't cache images. To work around this, I'm converting it to a base64 string; this should work with most vCard clients, but also increases the vCard file size considerably.

Chrome Side-loading Instructions

Instead of installing from the Chrome Webstore, you might might want to "side-load" a ZIP build for either local development, or to try out a new release that has not yet made it through the Chrome review process. Here are the instructions for doing so:

1. Find the ZIP you want to load
   • If you want to side-load the latest version, you can download a ZIP from the releases tab
   • If you want to side-load a local build, use npm run package-browserext to create a ZIP
2. Go to Chrome's extension setting page (chrome://extensions)
3. Turn on developer mode (upper right toggle switch)
4. Drag the downloaded zip to the browser to let it install
5. Test it out, then uninstall

You can also unpack the ZIP and load it as "unpacked".

Troubleshooting

When in doubt, refresh the profile page before using this tool.

Troubleshooting - Debug Log

If I'm trying to assist you in solving an issue with this tool, I might have you share some debug info. Currently, the easiest way to do this is to use the Chrome developer's console:

1. Append ?li2jr_debug=true to the end of the URL of the profile you are on
2. Open Chrome dev tools, and specifically, the console (instructions)
3. Run the extension (try to export the profile), and then look for red messages that show up in the console (these are errors, as opposed to warnings or info logs).
   • You can filter to just error messages, in the filter dropdown above the console.

Updates:

Development

With the rewrite to a browser extension, I actually configured the build scripts to be able to still create a bookmarklet from the same codebase, in case the bookmarklet ever becomes a viable option again.

Building the browser extension

npm run build-browserext will transpile and copy all the right files to ./build-browserext, which you can then side-load into your browser. If you want to produce a single ZIP archive for the extension, npm run package-browserext will do that.

Use build-browserext-debug for a source-map debug version. To get more console output, append li2jr_debug=true to the query string of the LI profile you are using the tool with.

Building the bookmarklet version

Currently, the build process looks like this:

• src/main.js -> (webpack + babel) -> build/main.js -> mrcoles/bookmarklet -> build/bookmarklet_export.js -> build/install-page.html
  • The bookmark can then be dragged to your bookmarks from the final build/install-page.html

All of the above should happen automatically when you do npm run build-bookmarklet.

If this ever garners enough interest and needs to be updated, I will probably want to re-write it with TypeScript to make it more maintainable.

LinkedIn Documentation

For understanding some peculiarities of the LI API, see LinkedIn-Dev-Notes-README.md.

Debugging

Debugging the extension is a little cumbersome, because of the way Chrome sandboxes extension scripts and how code has to be injected. An alternative to setting breakpoints in the extension code itself, is to copy the output of /build/main.js and run it via the console.

li2jr = new LinkedinToResumeJson(true, true);
li2jr.parseAndShowOutput();

Even if you have the repo inside of a local static server, you can't inject it via a script tag or fetch & eval, due to LI's restrictive CSP.

If you do want to find the actual injected code of the extension in Chrome dev tools, you should be able to find it under Sources -> Content Scripts -> top -> JSON Resume Exporter -> {main.js}

Debugging Snippets

Helpful snippets (subject to change; these rely heavily on internals):

// Get main profileDB (after running extension)
var profileRes = await liToJrInstance.getParsedProfile(true);
var profileDb = await liToJrInstance.internals.buildDbFromLiSchema(profileRes.liResponse);

DISCLAIMER:

This tool is not affiliated with LinkedIn in any manner. Intended use is to export your own profile data, and you, as the user, are responsible for using it within the terms and services set out by LinkedIn. I am not responsible for any misuse, or repercussions of said misuse.

Attribution:

Icon for browser extension:

• https://www.iconfinder.com/icons/95928/arrow_down_download_profile_icon