A new working paper, published in July by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that some LinkedIn users are going back to jobs they left years ago and adding AI skills that only became popular after ChatGPT arrived.
Nicholas Bloom said, "It gives you a snapshot of what people think employers want." That snapshot is not always pretty.
The paper is called "Time Travel on Professional Profiles."
It uses monthly LinkedIn data, assisted by the workforce analytics firm Revelio Labs, and it counts any edit of at least one word in a past job title or description as time traveling.
Some edits are harmless. People who were not active on LinkedIn while they held a job may add it later, and that is a normal fix.
Other edits are harder to believe.
AI-related terms like LLM (large language model), GPT, and artificial intelligence surged on profiles after late 2022, when ChatGPT was released.
Users added those terms to roles dating back to 2012, years before the AI boom.
Researchers find that hard to believe. "They claim to have been an AI product manager," Bloom said.
He added that with edits like these, "it's hard to tell whether they really ever were."
From 2020 through 2026, approximately one out of five long-time U.S. LinkedIn members changed something in an old job listing.
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AI product managers were the most frequent editors. Roughly 70% of self-described AI product managers changed something about the job after they had already left it.
The timing looks suspicious too. The median gap between leaving a job and editing it was 4.5 years, and the rate of edits doubles shortly before a job change.
"It's kind of like the fashion cycle for job titles, job descriptions," Bloom said. When a skill becomes trendy, people want to look like they had it before it was cool.
Employers are clearly looking for AI experience. A ZipRecruiter survey from July found that nearly three-quarters of employers consider AI skills a strong advantage or a requirement.
U.S. job postings with "AI" in the title have more than tripled since 2022, according to an Indeed report from July.
That demand pushes some people to stretch the truth.
"I know what employers are looking for, I know I need to hit on these buzzwords, so I go back and add them into my profile, even if they're not strictly true," Bloom said.
AI also makes it easier to generate application materials, which adds to the competition. More applications means more noise for recruiters to sort through.
All this is happening while the job market cools. The U.S. lost 23,000 jobs in July.
The slowdown is not just one bad month. May and June job numbers were revised down by a cumulative 103,000.
That squeeze raises the stakes for every job application. It also helps explain why so many people are reaching for an edge.
Bloom sees it as an arms race.
Job seekers add keywords "just to get to the first round" of screening, employers get buried under applications, and AI makes it easier to send even more.
"It's an arms race on both sides," he said.
For a regular person updating a profile, the experts point to a simple habit. Jeff Hyman suggested in 2022 that people update their profiles every three months and after performance reviews.
And Bloom adds a ground rule: more is almost always better than less, "as long as it's truthful."
In a market full of edited history, the profile that matches your real work history is the one that still makes sense when a recruiter asks about it.
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