Why some client CVs had unreadable company names

Hireo lets an agency put its own brand on the CVs it sends to clients: a name, a logo and two colours. The point is that the client sees the agency's document, not ours. In September 2026 we found that for some agencies the result was a CV you could barely read.

What we expected

We expected a brand colour to be a design choice and nothing more. Take the primary colour from the agency's profile, use it for the header bar, the stripe beside each role, the company name and the skill tags, and it all looks like the agency.

What broke

Our own measurements showed that one colour was doing two jobs with opposite needs. As a fill or a rule, a pale colour is quiet and fine. As text on a white page, a pale colour cannot be read. Agencies choose their colour for their own screens, where it usually sits behind white text on a button. A colour that makes a good background is often a poor foreground.

We measured the stored primary colours against the white page. The worst gave a contrast ratio of 1.29 to 1, which means a yellow-green company name was close to invisible. Others sat between 2.3 and 3.8 to 1. The usual bar for body text is 4.5 to 1. Several colours failed that bar; the rest were fine and we left them alone.

There was a second, earlier version of the same mistake. A redesign of the CV template that went out on 11 September used each agency's accent colour as a gradient behind white headings. One agency stored a near-white accent, and its client CVs went out with the section headings fading into the page. We patched the headings, and later that day went back to the previous template altogether, so the template is how it was before.

What we tried and what worked

Splitting the two roles was the fix. We left fills and rules on the brand colour. For text, a new function returns the brand colour unchanged when it already reads well. If not, it darkens the colour only as far as it has to, so the agency keeps its hue: the yellow-green company name stays yellow-green, just darker. If we cannot work out a colour's lightness at all, the text falls back to the page's normal near-black. We would rather show a company name in dark grey than in a colour nobody measured.

To confirm that agencies with readable colours were not affected, we generated the stylesheet for every stored colour before and after the change. Only the colours that failed changed.

Looking for the cause turned up a wider problem. The light grey we used for dates, locations and the footer was 3.89 to 1 on white for every agency, and the dot between location parts was 1.93 to 1. We darkened both, so they now measure 4.88 to 1. Because cached PDFs are only refreshed when the renderer version changes, we raised that version, otherwise existing client links would have kept showing the old grey. We also removed a written list of exceptions to our own contrast test, since the fix made every entry on it obsolete.

What you get now

Company names, role lines, skill tags and dates on a client CV are readable whatever colour your agency chose, and your colour still appears where it works as a fill. If a CV of yours looked wrong before, open it again on Hireo.

Written by the Hireo team.

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