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A new NBER working paper has a tidy name for what many of us suspected: people are rewriting their résumés after the fact. The study, “Time Travel on Professional Profiles,” finds millions of LinkedIn users quietly removed DEI language from past jobs around the same time President Donald Trump signed Executive Orders 14151 and 14173 that rolled back federal DEI programs. In plain English: when Washington changed the rules, people changed what they wanted employers to see.
The study and its big, obvious numbers
The authors — Nicholas Bloom, Gideon Moore, Lisa K. Simon and Caelan Wilkie‑Rogers — analyzed snapshots of roughly 29.4 million U.S. LinkedIn profiles. They flagged “time‑travel” edits: changes made more than 60 days after a job ended. About 19.7 percent of established users edited at least one old job, and the median edit came 4.5 years after the job ended. That’s not someone updating work they still do — it’s people rewriting history on purpose.
Timing lines up with policy changes
Three trends stand out. First, retroactive additions of AI terms exploded after ChatGPT’s arrival. Second, remote‑work language rose then fell as return‑to‑office rules returned. Third, and the point that matters here, net additions of DEI words like “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” decline sharply starting in early 2025. The timing aligns with Executive Orders 14151 and 14173 that cut or curtailed many federal DEI efforts and affected federal contractors. The paper doesn’t claim absolute proof that the orders caused the edits, but the coincidence is hard to ignore.
What this really shows: signaling over substance
The authors are blunt: workers tweak résumés to show what they think employers want. That’s a market signal. For years companies loved parading DEI language while actual workplace diversity barely budged. That was performative. Now even the performance is being scrubbed. Call it common sense — why brag about something that could now look like a liability or a headline? The market is adjusting. Recruiters want skills, not slogans, and job seekers are playing the game accordingly.
There are caveats. The paper is a working paper, not peer‑reviewed, and LinkedIn data skew toward white‑collar fields. Still, the pattern is clear enough to matter. If résumé time travel tells us anything, it’s that virtue signaling can be short‑lived when political winds shift. Employers and hiring managers should stop mistaking slogans for substance. Job seekers should focus on real skills — like actual AI experience — instead of retroactively adding woke badges to empty résumés. The rest is just cleanup on aisle LinkedIn.
