Promoting oneself in a job interview or performance evaluation can be a tricky business, as a job candidate needs to tout his or her accomplishments while not coming across as bragging. But one academic told CNBC’s Make It that he and his colleagues have developed a method that he calls “dual promotion.”

Dual promotion is promoting oneself, then following up with a promotion of someone else, Wharton School Professor of Management Maurice Schweitzer announced in “Dual Promotion: Bragging Better By Promoting Peers,” a paper he co-wrote with Eric Van Epps, an associate professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University, and Einav Hart, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at George Mason University’s Costello College of Business.

Schweitzer offers this example in the paper: “This project was successful because of our teamwork. I took care of all the financial analysis, technical processes, and back-end design. Alex really impressed me with how he handled our client communications. We both took charge of what we do best, and it led to a great outcome.”

Dual promotion serves to make one appear competent and likable, Schweitzer explained. He and his team found that, in most cases, a dual promoter seems more competent than the self-promoter, even though their accomplishments stayed exactly the same.

Being likable might even be the deciding factor, as a nearly two-decade old study published in the American Psychological Association found. Back in 2004, job candidates who focused on their likability were found to have had a better chance at getting hired than those who focused on promoting their accomplishments and strengths. 

Yet, despite the team’s documented success of dual promotion over self-promotion, hiring managers surveyed by Schweitzer did not seem to agree; they said that 69.1 percent of job candidates they have interviewed engaged only in self-promotion.