LinkedIn: Rewriting Your Past to Land Jobs? It's Happening

Quite a lot of people, to be precise. Researchers at Stanford University and Revelio Labs found that nearly 20% of established US LinkedIn users edited descriptions or titles of jobs they had left years earlier. Basically, one in five is giving their career history a little historical facelift.

And it gets more interesting when we look at the tech sector. Here, almost one in three workers doesn't mind doing a bit of "time travel" on their profile. This is no small figure, suggesting a clear trend to always appear up-to-date, or perhaps a little more advanced than they were back then.

It's not to refresh memories about what they were doing in 2010, let's be clear. These changes aren't made while memories are still fresh; instead, they reflect a shift in personal branding. The median time-travel edit occurs more than four years after the user left the role.

This means the goal is to optimize the profile for current positions, making the past more "appealing" to recruiters. Maybe that "database manager" becomes a "data solutions architect" with a few clicks. But is it really an "update" or a bit of healthy creative imagination?