Your LinkedIn history may not be history at all. A new working paper finds that 19.7 percent of established U.S. LinkedIn users go back and edit the title or description of a job they have already left, and those edits cluster around moments when people are changing employers.
The paper, “Time Travel on Professional Profiles,” is by Nicholas Bloom, Gideon Moore, Lisa K. Simon and Caelan Wilkie-Rogers, and was released as an NBER Working Paper on August 3, 2026.
Old jobs get rewritten when people look for new ones
Economists increasingly use professional profile data to reconstruct employment histories and measure the supply of skills. The authors show that these records are not fixed snapshots but mutable accounts that workers revise over time.
To measure this, they used monthly vintages of Revelio Labs data from 2020 to 2026, which let them compare what a profile said about a past job at different points in time.
These “time-travel” edits are closely tied to labor market transitions. Around such edits, workers are much more likely to change employers than users who edit later.
AI words in, remote work and DEI out
That mutability can bias historical measures of skills, the authors warn. But it also reveals what workers believe employers want.
Retroactive edits show sharp increases in AI-related language after 2022, and recent reductions in work-from-home and DEI language.
The way people write has changed too. Writing markers associated with large language models surge after the release of ChatGPT, especially among less-educated groups and among MBAs from lower-ranked programs, which the authors read as uneven use of AI to polish profiles.
Study Details:
- Title: Time Travel on Professional Profiles
- Authors: Nicholas Bloom, Gideon Moore, Lisa K. Simon, Caelan Wilkie-Rogers
- Journal: NBER Working Paper No. 35546
- Publication Date: August 3, 2026 (NBER issue date July 2026)
- DOI: 10.3386/w35546