LinkedIn users have begun to massively edit their profiles and add AI skills to make themselves more attractive to recruiters, a move that offers a glimpse into how professionals are trying to position themselves for a changing job market increasingly shaped by AI.
LinkedIn users have begun to massively edit their profiles and add AI skills to make themselves more attractive to recruiters, a move that offers a glimpse into how professionals are trying to position themselves for a changing job market increasingly shaped by AI.
These results were revealed by a new study by the US National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which analyzed 29.4 million American profiles from August 2020 to January 2026.
Main editing trends:
The number of cases where users retroactively add terms such as “AI”, “GPT”, “LLM” or “artificial intelligence” to previous job descriptions has increased 6 times since the introduction of ChatGPT;
Tags like "remote," "work from home," or "WFH" have become much less common in recent experiences. As companies return to the office in droves, users are removing these terms as often as they are adding them;
Starting in January 2025, there was a sharp decline in the addition of the words “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and “DEI,” coinciding with the executive restrictions on such programs in the United States.
Researchers have dubbed these users “time travelers,” as the median time to make corrections is more than four years after leaving their position. Almost one in five accounts (19.7%) changed past job descriptions, and in the IT and technology sector, this figure reaches 31.6%.
Scientists note that this is not necessarily a fake experience - often people simply reformulate actually completed tasks in modern language, focusing on new employer requests. According to the study authors, due to such corrections, the 2026 data cut overestimates the real availability of AI skills in 2022 by about 30%.
