Four years at one employer, two different business cards, and a CV that cannot decide what to do with either of them. Most templates assume that one employer means one job title and one date range, so an internal promotion quietly breaks the layout. This is a formatting problem before it is anything else, and the answer is a single decision you make once per employer.
Two layouts, and only two
Whatever template you are working in, an internal move ends up in one of two shapes. Everything else you have seen is a variation on these.
The stacked entry
The employer name appears once, as the header of a single block, with your total tenure beside it. Underneath sit the titles you held, each one with its own date range and its own bullets. One company header, several roles nested below it.
The advantage is that the block says "same place, growing responsibility" before a recruiter reads a single bullet. It also saves vertical space: employer, location and company descriptor are written once instead of twice.
Separate entries
The second shape repeats the employer name for every role. Each title becomes a standalone job entry with its own header, its own dates and its own bullets, so the company name appears twice on the page, one block after the other.
To a human reader that looks redundant. That redundancy buys parsing safety and the freedom to describe the two roles as unrelated jobs.
Which one to use
Stack when the roles sit in the same function, the tenure is continuous, and the second title is clearly above the first. Two or three titles stack well. Four starts to look like a list of internal reshuffles and needs pruning.
Use separate entries when the work genuinely changed function, for example a support agent who became a data analyst. Also separate them when you left and came back, when the roles sat in different subsidiaries with different legal names, or when another employer sits between the two stints. My default is stacked, because a recruiter scanning at speed needs to see continuity, and a repeated employer name reads at first glance like two short jobs rather than one long one.
What an ATS does with each format
Most parsers segment work history by employer header, then attach dates and bullets to the current segment. A stacked entry asks the parser to understand a hierarchy: one employer, two children, four date fields. Plenty of parsers handle it. The ones that do not tend to fail in a specific way, by assigning every bullet to the top title and collapsing the two ranges into one.
Separate entries give the parser nothing to infer, which is why they are the low-risk choice when you are applying into a large enterprise system and your stack is complicated. If you keep stacking, a few habits make the structure legible to software:
- Write the employer name as the identical string in every place it appears, with no "(same company)" note bolted on.
- Put each title on its own line, starting with the title itself rather than a date or a bullet character.
- Use plain month and year ranges, such as "Feb 2022 - Present", and keep the separator consistent.
- Never compress two titles onto one line with a slash, as in "Coordinator / Manager". Parsers store that as one strange title, and so do humans.
If you build the CV from a LinkedIn export rather than typing it, check the output: LinkedIn stores multiple titles at one employer as a grouped position, and converters like Postulit reproduce whatever grouping the profile already has.
Where the dates go
There are two clocks running and the reader wants both. Total tenure belongs on the company line, per-title ranges belong on each title line. Leave out the total and you force a recruiter to do arithmetic to see that you stayed five years. Leave out the per-title ranges and the promotion date disappears, which throws away the most useful thing the entry has to say.
Keep the ranges flush against each other with no overlap and no gap. If you moved up in April 2023, the earlier role ends March 2023 and the new one starts April 2023. Overlapping ranges make it look like you held both jobs at once, and a gap between two roles at the same employer looks like sloppy record-keeping or a suspension.
Month and year is the right granularity throughout. Year-only dates hide a promotion that happened inside a calendar year, and exact days belong on a contract, not a CV.
Splitting the bullets so the two roles are not the same job twice
Split by scope, not by task
This is where most stacked entries fall apart. The work often did not change much, so the bullets come out nearly identical and the whole block reads as padding. Fix it by dividing on scope rather than activity. The earlier role gets execution, volume and output. The later role gets ownership, budget, headcount, decisions and anything cross-team.
Delete rather than reword. If the later role supersedes something the earlier role did, cut it from the earlier role entirely instead of finding a synonym for it.
Weight the two roles unevenly. Four or five bullets under the current title, two under the previous one, one under anything older than that. Recruiters read top down and the oldest role is context, not evidence.
Cumulative numbers need care: put the headline result under the role where you owned it, and give the earlier role the groundwork.
If a recruiter could swap a bullet between your two titles without noticing, you have written the same job twice.
Name the promotion
Do not assume a second title speaks for itself. Many readers register a title change as a formatting artefact and move on. Make the first bullet under the new title carry the news: what you were promoted to, when, and what earned it. One sentence is enough, and it is the only place on a CV where the sentence is allowed to be about you rather than about the work.
If the move was fast relative to the normal cycle at that employer, and you know it was, say so in a clause. If you cannot support it, skip the claim rather than dressing it up.
A worked stacked entry
Northwind Logistics, Manchester. June 2019 to Present
Operations Manager (April 2022 to Present)
- Promoted from Coordinator after rebuilding the carrier allocation process; took over a team of six and a 2.1M annual freight budget.
- Cut average delivery exceptions from 9.4% to 3.1% across 40 depots by moving escalation from email to a single queue.
- Renegotiated four carrier contracts, holding cost per pallet flat through two fuel surcharge cycles.
- Ran the warehouse system migration for the northern region, delivered two weeks early with no missed shipments.
Operations Coordinator (June 2019 to March 2022)
- Handled 300+ daily shipment bookings across three depots, with a 99.2% on-time dispatch rate.
- Built the carrier scorecard later adopted as the regional standard.
Notice what the earlier role does not contain: no budget, no team, no contracts, and no repeat of the exception rate. It supplies the volume and the one artefact that survived the promotion.
When the title change was not a promotion
A lateral move
Stack it, but do not imply a climb. Lead the newer role with the change in remit rather than a promotion claim, something like "moved into the pricing team to own the tender model". A lateral move that produced results is easy to explain. A lateral move dressed as a promotion invites a question you will answer badly.
A re-org or a title refresh
If the employer renamed every Coordinator an Associate, that is not two roles and should not take two title lines. Keep one title, use the version that matches the market vocabulary, and spend the space on bullets. Listing an internal rebrand as career progression is the fastest way to look like you are padding.
An acting or interim role
Label it honestly and keep it. "Acting Head of Support (Jan 2023 to Aug 2023)" with the reason and the outcome is strong evidence, because someone chose you over the alternatives. What you cannot do is drop the word "Acting" and hope nobody checks, since a reference call will surface it within a minute.
Before you send the file, read the block cold: total tenure once on the company line, no two bullets that could trade places between titles, a date and a reason on the promotion, and the employer name spelled identically everywhere. If the entry survives that pass, the format is doing its job.