U.S. job seekers add AI terms to résumés as employer demand shifts

Stanford analysis finds 30% more AI mentions than pre-2023 profiles

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that job seekers are adding artificial-intelligence terms and skills to their résumés and online profiles to attract employers, a pattern visible across job-board data, professional networks, and academic analysis.

LinkedIn told the Journal that the percentage of U.S. users who added AI-related terms to their profiles rose 70% in 2025 compared with the prior year. On the employer side, 8% of U.S. job postings on Indeed mentioned AI in the first quarter of 2026, up from 3% in 2022, according to Indeed figures cited by the Journal.

The shift extends beyond roles that would traditionally have required technical expertise. The Journal highlighted postings for positions such as “AI Autonomous Truck Test Driver” and “Physical Therapist (AI Documentation),” in which AI fluency was not previously a standard qualification.

A new analysis by Stanford University economists Nick Bloom and Gideon Moore compared current LinkedIn profiles to archived versions of those profiles from before 2023. The researchers found that users are retroactively adding AI terms to job titles where the technology had not previously been mentioned; overall, today’s profiles contain 30% more references to AI than the archived versions.

Bloom, who co-authored the study with Lisa Simon and Caelan Wilkie-Rogers at workforce analytics company Revelio Labs, said some additions may reflect users updating the record, but he characterized much of the activity as “AI washing.” “A lot of it looks like AI washing,” Bloom told the Journal.

Some workers are pursuing formal certification. Grace Gravestock, a self-employed management consultant who struggled to find work for a year and a half, said she began experimenting intensively with AI tools, added “AI adoption leader” to her LinkedIn profile, and is pursuing a certification to formalize her credentials. “There’s a lot of big change happening now, there’s no way to fight it,” Gravestock said.

Others have turned to free training programs. Balaji Padmanabhan, who directs the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Business at the University of Maryland, launched a free AI-training course in May 2026 expecting perhaps 500 participants. To date, some 62,000 people have signed up, ranging from laid-off tech workers to former civil servants making career pivots.

Among the course participants is Elizabeth Meek, who spent two decades working for the federal government on biomedical research and infectious-disease tracking in animal populations. After President Trump returned to office and ordered federal workers back to their offices, Meek, who lives in Frederick, Maryland, said she faced a commute of more than four hours a day to Washington, D.C., felt demoralized, and took early retirement. She completed the Maryland course and found a new job at West Virginia University using AI for data analysis and app development. “It’s changed my life trajectory,” Meek said.

For all the activity, AI-skill claims remain a minority on LinkedIn: 1.2% of the platform’s 1.5 billion global users have added such skills to their profiles, according to the company. Among product managers, 13% report AI skills; among researchers, 10%; and among consultants, 7%.

The rush to claim AI fluency has not always produced results. Art Davis, a systems analyst who added “AI-powered automation” to his LinkedIn profile at the suggestion of an AI tool he uses to draft résumés and cover letters, said he has applied for 100 jobs since being laid off this spring without receiving an interview. “It’s grim out there,” Davis said.

Dina Taylor, chief evangelist at the AI hiring platform HireVue, said she encourages job seekers to add AI skills to their résumés even if they are still developing them. “Even if someone is just using ChatGPT to spin up recipes, it is ‘perfectly acceptable to say you leverage AI to support your daily projects or find ongoing areas of opportunity to add efficiencies into your life,’” Taylor said.

Executive career coach Denise Bitler said “Everybody’s keyword dumping,” noting that employers are doing the same thing as they try to attract candidates with AI-related skills.

The Stanford analysis also documented the inverse: job seekers are editing terms out of their profiles that may be less attractive to current employers. References to remote work and to diversity, equity and inclusion have dropped in recent years, according to the study.

The broader economic stakes remain unresolved. The Journal noted that some economists predict AI will eliminate jobs while others argue it will make employees more productive and reduce grunt work. Padmanabhan said the uncertainty itself is driving the behavior. “People recognize what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow,” Padmanabhan said.