Depressing but true: If you want to get ahead at work, embrace virtue signaling

By Brett Arends

Strategically embracing the right symbols in the office really can advance your career

"And this week's hashtags are..."

Here's a smart (if depressing) tip about getting ahead at work: Strategically embracing the right tribal symbols in the office - from political hashtags to sports teams - really can advance your career.

Stupid, but true.

The latest evidence comes from a fascinating new research study, which shows how nearly 3 million American workers have navigated the perilous polarization and "hashtag hell" of the past decade.

Bottom line: Strategic and timely virtue signaling has worked, even when it's cynical.

Researchers at Georgetown, Purdue and Harvard business schools found that between 2018 and 2025, large numbers of Americans updated their résumés to include "environmental, social and corporate-governance" buzzwords when ESG was most in fashion in corporate America.

And that many deleted them when ESG went out of fashion.

And that this strategy often paid dividends - because when ESG was in vogue, those using the right buzzwords were more likely to get promoted, even ahead of more-experienced, better-qualified rivals who didn't.

If you think this sounds like something out of the NBC comedy "The Office," welcome to planet Earth.

If you are shocked or surprised by these findings, or if you think they are just about ESG, you probably haven't been paying attention to the human behavior all around you since middle school. Human beings are pack animals. The pack demands conformity above all other things. It doesn't really matter what the conformity is about - political beliefs, sports teams, fashion, whatever. The point is the conformity itself - the act of obeisance to the tribe, the bending of the knee.

For most of human evolution, individuals - nonconformists - were dragged out of the village and stoned to death. Today, they just get "canceled." Progress!

Business-school professors Janet Gao of Georgetown, Jun Oh of Purdue and Joseph Pacelli of Harvard used AI to do a deep dive into an online database containing the résumés of 2.9 million American workers. They looked at how those workers updated their résumés between 2018 and 2025, particularly in relation to previous jobs. They looked at who added DEI language, when they did so and whether they later deleted it. They also looked at who got promoted, when and where. Finally, in a truly dystopian twist, they then analyzed the workers' political leanings "using data from L2 Inc., a nonpartisan data provider that aggregates records from various sources, including local election boards, exit polling and political donations." (Welcome to the future, folks. Big Brother and Big Sister are watching you.)

Here's what they found.

First, "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."

Second, "workers who added ESG language during the Biden years were significantly more likely to remove it following the 2024 election," when Trump returned to power.

Third, workers who added ESG buzzwords were more likely to get promoted, either at their current employer or to a new job elsewhere. That was true even for those who just added vague ESG language.

"ESG revisions are associated with significantly stronger career benefits," Gao, Oh and Pacelli wrote. Workers who added ESG language to their résumés saw a greater increase in their chances of landing a new job than those who revised other parts of their résumés.

Using complex data analysis, they found that ESG language was a factor in getting hired completely independently of all your other characteristics, including education and experience - with the result being that, on average, those who used ESG language and got hired were less likely to be the best fit for the job based on all the other characteristics.

This was true even for internal promotions. Your current employer has a lot of data about your job performance, but they may still consider your hashtags and buzzwords when deciding whether to promote you.

Fourth, manipulating ESG buzzwords and signaling to advance your career was especially common among those with about five to 14 years of work experience, which during the period studied - 2018 to 2025 - would mostly have correlated with the millennial generation. The older and more experienced the worker, the less likely they were to engage in ESG signaling.

"At the end of the day, firms want to hire and promote the right employees," Pacelli told Harvard's Jay Fitzgerald. "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."

Conservatives will take this as a judgment about ESG. But it's actually a judgment about fads and conformity more broadly. 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.

When I became a teenager, the fashion among boys' pants had suddenly gone from bell-bottoms (narrow at the thigh, loose at the ankle) to baggy (loose at the thigh, narrow at the ankle), and anyone caught wearing bell-bottoms might just as well have dropped out of school and run away to sea. I remember pondering this dramatic change in fashion - even though, of course, there had been no change in the shape of people's legs.

The sole purpose of fashion, one could argue, is to impose social conformity.

The real takeaway from this research is the very cynical one: If you want to get ahead at work, get along. People say they respect individuals, but nearly all of them are lying.

-Brett Arends

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11-03-26 1627ET