Back to the résumé

A new report shows that many jobseekers are editing their career back-stories, mostly to make themselves appear more qualified to hiring managers

WHAT’S IN A résumé? These days, a lot more things than there used to be. A little white fonting to trick the screener, some very vague references to your graduation date, and…according to a team of Stanford researchers, a flux capacitor, for the large amount of time travelling going on in today’s résumés.

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The research team recently published a paper indicating that just under 20 per cent of all workers have gone back and retroactively altered their past job descriptions or responsibilities for marketability purposes, a phenomenon they dub “time travel on professional profiles.”

The researchers say they discovered how much retroactive résumé editing was taking place while attempting to test a slightly different question about the validity of professional profile (e.g., LinkedIn) data, noticing that economists were “increasingly [using] professional profile data to reconstruct employment histories and measure skill supply.”

In attempting to show this method of research contained biases, they were able to point to this happening in real time: workers cramming their past job descriptions with markers of AI fluency to impress potential employers (or, increasingly, get screened well by automated AI systems).

“If I update my job description while still employed at a company, that could reflect either a change in how I describe my job or true changes in my responsibilities,” the research team, led by Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom, wrote. “If a worker has already left a job, their responsibilities cannot be changing, as the job is in the past. Thus, adjustments can only reflect a change in branding — the job is the same, but the way they talk about it has changed.”

One in five workers, the researchers found, has gone back and changed an old job description since 2020, and career coaches aren’t surprised. “Everybody’s keyword dumping,” one coach told the Wall Street Journal. 

A lot of this is in response to AI, of course, but the researchers found the effect runs in the opposite direction as well. “The precipitous drop we see in the [rate of DEI words] coincides with the start of the Trump presidency,” researcher Gideon Slocum Moore told Fast Company. “If workers think there is less demand for DEI expertise given these changes, it’s unsurprising they’d remove this type of language from their professional profile.”

And yes, some of it is complete hogwash — especially when it comes to AI. Given the premium place on AI skills in the contemporary job market, it is not surprising people are spinning up fanciful ways to advertise mundane skills; after all, if a résumé is more a marketing document than a historical one, everything’s fair game. “It’s perfectly acceptable to say you leverage AI to support your daily projects,” said Dina Taylor of Hirevue, “or find ongoing areas of opportunity to add efficiencies into your life.” Kieran Delamont