The Rise of the Career Revisionist
One in five professionals now revise their old job descriptions and titles. But what’s the difference between a “revision” and a “lie?”
In 2025, Ramona’s LinkedIn profile listed her old job as “Marketing Manager” and noted that she “built revenue spreadsheet models,” among other responsibilities. This year, she's updated the description of that old job: She was a “Marketing Data Analysis Lead” who “used AI to build and interpret revenue models.”
The actual 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 already do. Experts suggest that this type of revisionist history is partly a reflection of how fast the needs of the job market have shifted, especially in the AI era. “You need to re-represent the things that are maybe more relevant now than they were even a year or two ago,” says Korn Ferry senior partner Ron Porter.
But the patience of HR pros only goes so far. There's a fine line between putting your best foot forward and exaggerating—or worse. Indeed, today's brutal job market has made outright fabrication more tempting, with more than 60% of people admitting to lying on their résumé or professional profile at least once, according to a survey from résumé service StandOut CV. “Once you post, it’s out there and out there forever,” says Dennis Deans, Korn Ferry’s global human resources business partner. He points out that firms do track what candidates have previously posted.
In the new study, researchers from Stanford and Revelio Labs looked at 500,000 LinkedIn profile pages from 2020 through 2026, zeroing in on people who had changed jobs. They found that a surprisingly high percentage of LinkedIn users edited the titles or descriptions of their former jobs, typically years after their departure. The biggest revisionists were MBAs, 29% of whom altered past work experiences, a big contrast with the 19% who listed high school as their highest education level. One factor: MBAs may fear that organizations do not think their 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.
The study also revealed that certain professions were significantly more likely than others to make retroactive revisions. The most likely were people in technology and information roles, of whom nearly one-third, or 32%, rewrote their profiles. That’s not surprising, say experts, given how fast tech trends develop. In fact, retroactive edits around AI exploded sixfold after ChatGPT was introduced in late 2022. On the other end of the spectrum, only 14% of real estate professionals retroactively revised their profiles.
These kinds of revisions aren’t necessarily bad, experts say. 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 more blatant changes, experts say, can be easy to spot, even without modern digital-tracking tools. A candidate once emailed Deans his résumé, only to bring a completely different one to his interview. “We called him on it,” Deans says.
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