"Workers modify their résumé to reflect what they believe employers want to hear," they said.
Workers are retrospectively adding AI skills to their LinkedIn profiles — while remote-work and DEI language is falling out of favor.
That is the finding of a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, which analyzed monthly snapshots of 29.4 million US LinkedIn profiles.
Nearly a fifth of those accounts had retroactively changed the title or description of a job they had already left, the non-peer-reviewed paper said, which was authored by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom and researchers at Stanford and Revelio Labs.
Since ChatGPT's release in late 2022, the number of retroactive additions of terms such as "AI," "GPT," "LLM," and "artificial intelligence" to previous roles has risen more than sixfold, the paper said. The profiles were collected by labor-market data firm Revelio Labs from August 2020 through January 2026.
At the same time, workers became less likely to add remote-work language — including "remote," " work from home ," and "WFH" — to past roles. By the end of 2025, workers were adding those terms about as often as they were deleting them, a shift that coincided with a wave of return-to-office mandates.
The researchers also found a sharp decline in additions of terms including "diversity," "equity," "inclusion," and "DEI" at the beginning of 2025, coinciding with President Donald Trump's executive orders in January of that year targeting DEI programs .
"Workers modify their résumé to reflect what they believe employers want to hear," the authors wrote.
A shifting job-market signal
The LinkedIn edits offer a glimpse of how workers are trying to position themselves for a changing job market that's increasingly being shaped by AI.
The researchers dubbed the practice "time travel" and those doing it "time travelers" because they are going back to revise roles they had already left.
It was especially prevalent in technology and information, where 31.6% of workers had retroactively edited an old role — far above the study-wide rate of 19.7% — followed by arts, entertainment, and recreation at 25% and professional, scientific, and technical services at 24.1%. The median edit came more than four years after the job ended.
These edits often happen when workers are preparing to move jobs, the researchers said, making them a potential signal of what workers believe employers want.
"Expertise in artificial intelligence becomes increasingly common to retroactively add to résumés," they wrote.
That does not necessarily mean workers are exaggerating their AI experience . They could be adding detail they had previously omitted or reframing existing work in language they believe will appeal to employers.
The paper also cautions against treating today's LinkedIn profiles as a fixed record of the past. It estimates that a 2026 snapshot would overstate the prevalence of AI-related skills in 2022 by around 30%.
Put another way, "the job is the same, but the way they talk about it has changed," the researchers wrote.
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