A promotion is one of the strongest signals a resume can carry — an employer who knew your work chose to give you more of it. Formatted badly, it reads as job-hopping or gets lost entirely.
In short: use the stacked format — one company header, roles listed under it newest-first with dates — when the roles were similar and the story is growth. Use separate entries when the roles were genuinely different jobs and each needs its own accomplishments. Either way, make the promotion explicit ("Promoted to…") in the first bullet of the newer role; don't make the reader infer it from dates.
Format 1 — stacked (the default)
```
ACME CORP — Chicago, IL 2021–2026
Senior Operations Manager (2024–2026)
• Promoted to lead a 12-person team after two years managing the region's top-performing site
• [accomplishment bullet]
Operations Manager (2021–2024)
• [accomplishment bullet]
```
One company line keeps your tenure visible (5 years, not two 2.5-year stints), and the stacked titles show the arc at a glance. This is the right choice 80% of the time.
Format 2 — separate entries
```
ACME CORP — Senior Data Analyst 2024–2026
• Promoted from support engineering into the analytics org
• [accomplishment bullets]
ACME CORP — Support Engineer 2021–2024
• [accomplishment bullets]
```
Choose this when the promotion was really a career change inside one company — different team, different skill set — and each role earns its own bullet space. It costs you the visual continuity, so the first bullet of the newer role must say "promoted" explicitly.
Three mistakes that hide your promotion
1.Listing only the final title. "Senior Manager, 2021–2026" erases the promotion — the single best fact in the entry.
2.Repeating duties across both roles. The older role gets the foundation bullets; the newer role gets scope, ownership, results. If the bullets could swap between roles, rewrite them — the bullet rewriter is built for exactly this.
3.Making the reader do date math. "Promoted after 18 months" is a bullet, not a puzzle.
Does the stacked format confuse ATS software?
Modern parsers handle both formats. The failure mode isn't the stacking — it's decorative layouts (columns, text boxes) around it. Keep the structure plain and any format works; our resume builder formats stacked promotions ATS-safely by default, and the skills-on-a-resume guide covers the rest of the modern format.
FAQ
Multiple promotions at one company? Stack all the titles with dates; give bullets only to the two most recent unless an older role is uniquely relevant. For how to keep the entry compact, see multiple positions at the same company.
A title change without a raise or new duties — is that a promotion? List the newer title; don't claim "promoted" in a bullet unless scope actually grew. Interviews surface inflated claims fast.
Lateral moves? Stack them the same way, but the bullet says what changed ("moved to the platform team to own reliability") rather than "promoted".