How I increased application-ready resumes by 40% by defining a minimum viable resume.

OCC Mundial was the largest job marketplace in Mexico, with more open roles than anyone else in the market. But the company had no product team. When a client wanted to see more information, they told sales, and sales told engineering to build it. The onboarding flow grew like a tumor. It filled up with useless fields that reflected one client's passing whim, a sales rep's attempt to land a big account, and a general disregard for the candidate on the other side of the transaction. It ended up looking like a form built to keep candidates away, not bring them in.

A resume is currency in a job marketplace. No resume, no application. No application, nothing for a recruiter to see.

More than twenty minutes. That's what it took to go from creating an account to applying for a single job. I timed it myself, sitting there as a first-time user, and our data team's funnel reports backed it up with the step-by-step picture: people weren't dropping off at one bad screen, they were bleeding out gradually, field by field. Every extra one cost us conversions, and not in a straight line either: each hurt more than the last. Candidates were asked for everything before they'd seen a shred of value.

But if we wanted to cut the effort it took to build a resume, we couldn't just start killing fields at random. We had to look at the other side of the coin too: what a recruiter actually needs to know to decide whether a candidate is worth their time.

So I went to the other side of the marketplace. I sat down with recruiters directly and ran workshops with them to understand what they actually looked at in that first pass over a candidate. Most of what a resume asked for turned out to be irrelevant to that decision. Location and last job did almost all the work. Whether someone showed a real career trajectory mattered too, but not this early. That signal only became useful later, once a recruiter had already decided to move forward with someone. Everything else, the recruiters themselves helped me sort into nice-to-have.

So I stopped asking for everything up front. This is progressive disclosure in its plainest form: ask for the minimum a recruiter actually needs to not throw someone out, and earn the rest of the profile later, once the person is already invested. I cut roughly 60 to 75% of the fields required before someone could apply, which felt reckless the first time I said the number out loud in a meeting. It landed anyway, and not because anyone just trusted me on the percentage. I walked the room through the usability principles behind it, why progressive disclosure works, why a shorter first step beats a complete one nobody finishes, and once people saw the reasoning instead of just the number, there wasn't much pushback left.

What remained went into a five-step wizard with smart prefill: type a zip code, get city and state for free. Anything that wasn't strictly needed to apply moved to later. The dashboard changed too. There was already a static dashboard; it became the Career Control Center, something closer to a control center: who viewed your resume, who downloaded it, what to do next. We framed the prompts to fill in the rest as tips instead of demands: someone viewed your resume, update it now. Candidates with at least three jobs listed are more likely to get hired. Everyone applying to this role has their English level listed, add yours too.