Why your LinkedIn updates might be the ultimate career blunder

You might think you’re being stealthy when you start searching for a new job. Without telling anyone about your plans you secretly look up job ads, or you ask quietly around your networks to see if they have any leads.

But no matter how much you believe you’re tip-toeing around in silence, there’s a glaring giveaway that you’re about to walk out the door.

This month researchers confirmed this telltale sign by analysing tens of millions of professional online profiles and watching them change over several years. They noticed that most workers update their profiles on LinkedIn just before they start applying for new roles, and that there’s a direct correlation between when someone edits their page and how soon they’ll begin a new job.

The research was conducted by Stanford Professor Nick Bloom and several of his colleagues. They named the common occurrence of logging in to your digital CV and updating it as “LinkedIn time travel”, an apt name for the act of going back in time to make things sound more impressive than they may have been at the time.

They found that people were returning to the title and description of work they completed years ago to update them. For example, younger, tech and MBA-type workers were editing previous experiences to add AI-related words like ‘GPT’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ to old descriptions.

And, in a sad indictment of modern political reality, many were also deleting previous references to words relating to DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion).

But it was the data around the timing of this editing being able to accurately predict job changes that was the most fascinating. ‘LinkedIn time travelling’ rose sharply in the months before switching employers, becoming a dead giveaway for anyone who knows what to look out for.

Everything you update on LinkedIn is public, so your manager, workmates and your network can see hints that you’ve started looking without you even realising it.

“Professional profile data is a powerful new tool for labor economics,” wrote Bloom and his colleagues in the working paper, while cautioning that it only showed some of the picture. After someone had shifted roles, the time travel rates returned towards the baseline of where they were before they started thinking about a new job.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with going back over your work history and updating it so that it sounds better. Our identities at work are constantly shifting, as are the personal narratives we tell about ourselves, so it’s only natural to adjust them as we go.

We are forever rethinking our understanding of the past to help make sense of the present. This means reinterpreting old jobs and events that may have felt random at the time to craft them into a coherent and linear structure that’s led us to where we are today.

The bigger problem is that most of us tend to only do this once every few years when we’re beginning our job search.