The Rise of the ‘Revised’ Résumé
Twenty percent of professionals retroactively rewrite their old job descriptions and titles, and 30% of MBAs do. But what’s the difference between a revision and a lie?
In 2025, Ramona’s LinkedIn profile listed her old job as “marketing manager,” with responsibilities that included “built revenue spreadsheet models.” This year, she updated and spruced up her profile: As a former “marketing data analysis lead,” she “used AI to build and interpret revenue models.”
The actual job role didn’t change, but the way Ramona described it certainly did. According to a new working paper, more than 20% of people might be rewriting their career histories this way, and nearly 30% of people holding MBA degrees do. Experts suggest that this type of revisionist history of former roles is an attempt by candidates to look more relevant, especially in a job market that is not growing much. “You need to re-represent the things that are maybe more relevant now than they were even a year or two ago,” says Ron Porter, a Korn Ferry senior partner and member of the firm’s Supply Chain Center of Expertise.
To be sure, experts say there’s a big difference between changing how you describe your old role and just making it up. More than 60% of people admit to lying on their résumé or professional profiles at least once, according to a survey from résumé service StandOut CV. That’s a risky practice, experts say, especially in an era when multiple versions of a person’s career profile can be found easily. Companies today often preserve every résumé a candidate has ever submitted electronically, and various software programs can show earlier versions of LinkedIn pages. “Once you post, it’s out there and out there forever,” says Dennis Deans, Korn Ferry’s global human resources business partner.
To test the scope of résumé revisions, researchers from Stanford and Ravelio Labs looked at 500,000 LinkedIn profile pages from 2020 to 2026, zeroing in on people who had changed jobs. They found that a surprisingly high number of users edited the titles or descriptions of jobs they had left, typically years later. The biggest revisionists were MBAs, with nearly 30% of that cohort altering past work experiences, a big contrast to the about 20% of revisors who listed high school as their highest education level. The researchers concluded that people must believe skills on their profile influence the likelihood they’ll get hired, although they did not investigate whether the revisions actually helped.
MBAs might be the biggest revisionists because they feel they’re in the job market more often than other groups, say experts. They might also think they have to constantly show that their roles are strategic in nature. Porter says that the MBAs likely are trying to draw a line from the junior jobs they once had to the senior role they have now and the even more senior role they want in the future.
Revisors with more recent MBAs might also suspect that many organizations do not think the degree is as valuable as it used to be. “People who come out of business school are often business generalists, while companies are looking for specific skills,” says JT Saunders, Korn Ferry’s chief talent development officer.
There was also a wide difference in which professions were mostly likely to make retroactive revisions. At 32%, those in technology were most likely to do so. That’s not surprising, say experts, given how fast tech trends develop. Indeed, retroactive edits around AI exploded sixfold after 2022, when ChatGPT was introduced. On the other end of the spectrum, only 14% of real-estate professionals made retroactive revisions to their profiles.
The practice of making revisions isn’t necessarily deceitful, experts say. Indeed, in a world of constant disruption, it’s not a bad practice to make an online professional profile or résumé sound as current as possible. But moderation is advised. HR officials say exaggerations can be easy to spot, even without modern digital tools. In one case, a candidate emailed Deans a résumé, then brought a completely different one to his interview. “We called him on it,” he says.
Learn more about Korn Ferry’s Talent Acquisition capabilities.
