Résumé Study Finds ESG Buzzwords Boosted Promotions—Even Cynical Ones

Workers who added ESG buzzwords to their résumés between 2018 and 2025 were significantly more likely to get promoted—even ahead of better-qualified colleagues who didn't. That's the headline finding from researchers at Georgetown, Purdue and Harvard business schools, who used AI to analyze an online database of 2.9 million American résumés.

Business-school professors Janet Gao of Georgetown, Jun Oh of Purdue and Joseph Pacelli of Harvard tracked how those workers updated their résumés across seven years, focusing on additions and deletions of environmental, social and corporate-governance language, and correlated the changes with promotion outcomes.

What did the researchers find?

The paper documents a clear political rhythm in how workers signaled virtue. The findings, in the authors' own words:

• "A surge in the number of workers adding ESG-related language in job descriptions present in their online résumés around the November 2020 election of President Biden, and a spike in deletions around the November 2024 election of Donald Trump."
• "Workers who added ESG language during the Biden years were significantly more likely to remove it following the 2024 election."
• Workers who added ESG buzzwords— even vague ones—were more likely to get promoted, either internally or at a new employer.
• "ESG revisions are associated with significantly stronger career benefits," Gao, Oh and Pacelli wrote.

The career payoff was real. Workers who added ESG language saw a greater increase in their chances of landing a new job than those who revised other parts of their résumés. That boost held even for internal promotions, where the employer already possessed detailed data on actual job performance.

Who gamed the system?

The pattern wasn't uniform across the workforce. Manipulating ESG buzzwords was most common among workers with roughly five to 14 years of experience—during the 2018–2025 study window, mostly millennials. The older and more experienced the worker, the less likely they were to engage in ESG signaling.

In a twist that reads like dystopian fiction, the researchers also analyzed workers' political leanings using data from L2 Inc., a nonpartisan data provider that aggregates records from local election boards, exit polling and political donations.

What does this mean for hiring quality?

Here's the costly part for employers. Using complex data analysis, the researchers found ESG language influenced hiring independently of all other characteristics, including education and experience. The result: on average, those hired with ESG language on their résumés were less likely to be the best fit for the job on every other measure.

Pacelli put it bluntly in comments to Harvard's Jay Fitzgerald: "At the end of the day, firms want to hire and promote the right employees. But we show that companies chasing the current political trend can actually end up hiring potentially less-qualified workers. The companies are sacrificing quality for that alignment."

Is this just about ESG?

Brett Arends, whose ROI column carried the analysis, argues no. Conservatives may read the study as a verdict on ESG specifically, but he frames it as a judgment about fads and conformity more broadly. His take: "You don't want to be #BLM at a company where your co-workers, and especially your boss, is #MAGA, any more than vice versa."

Arends drives the point home with a fashion analogy from his own teenage years, when boys' pants swung from bell-bottoms to baggy seemingly overnight—and anyone still in bell-bottoms faced social exile. No one's legs had changed shape. "The sole purpose of fashion, one could argue, is to impose social conformity," he writes.

His conclusion for ambitious office workers is unsentimental: "If you want to get ahead at work, get along. People say they respect individuals, but nearly all of them are lying."

The study covers nearly 3 million workers navigating what Arends calls the "hashtag hell" of the past decade's polarization. For employers, the message is that trend-chasing in hiring carries a measurable quality cost. For workers, the data suggests the signaling premium is now visible, quantified—and, in a shifting political climate, quickly reversible.