LinkedIn Users Are Rewriting the Past to Land Jobs

0:00 This practice has been going on forever, right? People have been polishing their resumes for as long as there have been resumes. But what's interesting here is that, you know, after the introduction of ChatGPT, we really saw a surge in words, associated with AI. So llm I gpt people were going back and adding these to jobs that they had left. And this is not sort of like fresh, you know, in their memories. This was like a medium offer of jobs they had left four years prior.

0:30 so something really interesting happening happening there. So employers, I guess the folks that actually use LinkedIn to find employees, are they getting hip to this? Are they are they dealing with it, recognizing it. So I think there's a couple ways to think about this. One, this this whole thing came up because researchers who study the labor market use LinkedIn now as as data. It's a treasure trove for them. But this paper examines this idea of how much, do these edits actually change our understanding of the labour market?

1:03 So they found, for example, that if based on the edits, the time traveling that people, have done, we would be overstating people's eye skills in 2022 by by 30%. So it doesn't so much give us a great understanding of of the labour market of the past as much as it does maybe an understanding of what employers are looking for today or what they're not looking for, because that's what people are reacting to, right? It's like, oh, I think I think that employers want AI skills.

1:33 So I'm going to make sure that it looks like I had those capabilities and rewriting history in the process. I'm totally to to point. I wonder how employers are looking at this when we don't even know if human, recruiters are looking at this, or whether bots are looking at people's resumes and kind of filtering out, and filtering in, resumes that they think are appropriate for jobs that they want to have, to feature, I experience. I think we are in this eye doom loop where we have people using, as we know, AI to write their resumes, write their LinkedIn profiles in order to apply for jobs that will be screened by AI to make sure that they fit the job descriptions that were also written by AI. So I don't know that I don't know what this is telling us. We're not getting a lot of really good information. but I do think that employers we are seeing an increase in jobs, that are posted that are related to EI, that are asking for human capabilities. Right?

2:36 Empathy, creativity. the problem is that I don't know how I assesses that. Right. So so we're in it. We're in a very difficult cycle right now. So, Beth, does LinkedIn assume any responsibility or liability for making sure stuff is actually accurate or poor? They're just a platform. They're just a platform. They're just a footbridge. They're just a platform. And I should say there. I'm not making any moral assessment about this. Right. Because I do think I get like people have been tailoring their jobs to, whatever the, you know, job they're applying for.

3:11 There's obviously different degrees of that. So it's and again, I don't think people I think it is hard to go back and say, hey, I had all these I, I skills ten years ago. Right. But I do I do think that the practice itself is not is not new, but the way it's so public I think is is very new. You're not just sending it to one employer, you're putting it out there for everybody to see. And the the interesting part of this research study was that this is happening in particular to the tech industry, people in the tech, fields who are looking for jobs where I guess it's more credible that they might have been doing something with AI and large language models four years ago or five years ago than, say, if Paul or I put it in our resumes. Totally.

3:56 Totally. Yeah. I was like, when I think for tech. So it was 20%, for the overall popular, you know, LinkedIn user population in the US. But it was 1 in 3 for tech workers. but I, you know, I think that it can tell us it does tell us information, about the labor market, even if it's not so much a historical artifact. Right. We could say, you know, if we saw a surge in people update. So people do tend to update their, their LinkedIn profiles before changing jobs.

4:25 There's a correlation. You know, there's there's a, a high connection there. So what they found what? You know, I think one way to think about this is if we see a surge in people updating their LinkedIn profiles, does this for tell the next great resignation, or could you tell something about a company's health if you were looking at a particular company and saw a lot of employees updating their LinkedIn profiles, does this mean we're going to have a mass exodus of employees? So this data is still useful, just not in the way I think a lot of economists had anticipated.