There’s a new trend online called “LinkedIn time travel,” and it has nothing to do with a DeLorean.
The practice refers to users of the job networking site editing their former jobs, mostly to make themselves appear more qualified to hiring managers. According to a report from the National Bureau of Economic Research and Revelio Labs, which examined tens of millions of profiles, the trend seems to be widespread.
The research found that one-fifth (19.7%) of users change the title or description of a job long after they’ve left the position to increase their desirability in the market. On average, the change happens around four years later. Other practices include adding AI keywords to seem more hirable in the AI era; other users strike DEI-related words at a time in which DEI efforts remain under political fire.
The trend was most commonly spotted among young job seekers. The under-30 crowd time-traveled 38.1% of the time, which makes sense given how immensely challenging young people are finding the job market. The numbers vary greatly by job type, too: Those in AI leadership roles, design, and qualitative research time travel frequently; the trend showed up on 56.6% of profiles for those jobs. In UX research jobs, edits were made on a slightly greater number of profiles—59.2%. But the top two kinds of job seekers who relied on this kind of profile editing were those in tech jobs. By education level, MBA holders engage the most, at 29.3%.
But what’s the difference between this and simply updating your résumé?
Gideon Slocum Moore, a Stanford University researcher who co-authored the paper, says time traveling goes further than, say, tweaking your CV following a layoff or because you haven’t done it in a while. That’s because time traveling may involve blatantly adding responsibilities that didn’t exist at the job during the time the employee worked at the company.
Moore says, “Suppose you worked at Amazon working in recommendation systems from 2013 to 2017 and list it on your résumé as ‘machine learning engineer.’ In 2023, the job market starts rewarding ‘AI’ skills, so you go change the description of your Amazon job to “machine learning and AI engineer.”
Moore continues, “By 2023, you’ve already left your job at Amazon; this means the responsibilities of your job can’t have changed. The only thing that changes is how you have chosen to market it—this is what we call ‘time travel.'”
That’s why LinkedIn “time travel” isn’t just the timeless habit of fudging on your résumé or inflating what you did in past roles. There’s a fundamental dishonesty that could get rewarded as recruiters hunt for certain keywords on the biggest networking site on the internet.
In addition to that, the trend is a sign of the times. While AI words are being added to profiles, DEI words are disappearing. Moore says this reflects recent changes in business since President Donald Trump took office.
“The precipitous drop we see in the figure coincides with the start of the Trump presidency,” Moore explains, noting that the orders “targeting DEI programs as discriminatory and disqualifying for federal contracts” are particularly to blame.
The researcher continues, “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.” Not everyone is engaging in time travel, though. At the bottom of the list in this study were wellness practitioners like chiropractors, who only altered their past jobs 3.3%. Dental surgeons and orthodontists did so the least at 2.4%.
Still, in a moment when job security feels more fragile than ever, it shouldn’t be a surprise so many candidates are doing what they can to stand out—even if that means manipulating the time-space continuum on a social media site.