Strategically embracing the right symbols in the office really can advance your career 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. The latest evidence comes from afascinating 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.
Don’t Short Yourself offers weekly money tips to help you earn it, stack it and grow it. I would like to receive updates and special offers from Dow Jones and affiliates. I can unsubscribe at any time.
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 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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
