How to Right Align Dates on Resume

I thought I could leave something as simple as aligning resume dates to the internet, but after reading the top article about this topic, I almost threw my computer screen across the room. They’re all written by grammar teachers and outsourced bloggers. I love teachers and bloggers, but some of the information was just plain harmful.

So here I am, writing an article about how to right align dates on your resume so you have accurate information from an experienced recruiter, hiring manager, and resume writer with over 20 years of experience.

Here’s what I’m going to cover in today’s article:

1. How to Write Dates on Your Resume for Job Experiences

2. How to Write Dates on Your Resume for Education

3. What to Do If Your Dates Overlap

4. ATS Facts and Myths About Reading Date Formats

5. Why You Should Right Align Dates on Your Resume

6. How to Right Align Dates in Google Docs

7. How to Right Align Dates in Microsoft Word

8. Let’s dive in!

How Do You Arrange Dates on a Resume

It may not seem like a big deal, but the dates associated with your experiences can tell the recruiter and hiring manager a great deal about you. They can also contribute to bias. This section will help you decide how to list the dates on your work experiences and education.

How to Write Dates for Job Experiences

Here are some acceptable resume date formats for your work experiences. You can list them with months and years or simply years.

• Month/Year (ex. July 2018 - Oct 2020)

• Years Only (ex. 2018 - 2020)

I’ve seen and used both formats. They are both widely used and very common.

What you don’t want to do is list your exact start and end dates. Some applications may ask for them still, but this is not an application. This is your resume. Applications (all that pesky information you have to enter when applying for a job) are legal documents and that’s why they require so much more information. Your resume is not a legal document and you don’t need that level of detail.

Examples of Dates for Job Experiences

1. July 2018 - Oct 2020

2. July 2018 - Oct. 2020

3. 7/2018 - 10/2020

4. 07/2018 - 10/2020

5. 2018 - 2020

6. 2018 to 2020

I personally prefer the formats in number one and five, but all of these will work fine for your resume.

Abbreviations Are Your Friend

Less is more in a resume. Recruiters and hiring managers only have so many brain calories to burn each day so you don’t want to make them burn more by including more words and information to process.

Listing your dates with abbreviations is a best practice you should follow.

Here’s a list of abbreviations for each month of the year (Yale University).

Consistency Is Important

Whatever format you choose to write dates of employment, use the same format each time. You want to be consistent with your format.

Should You Always Put Dates on Your Resume?

Most of the time yes, but you do need to know when to break the rules. With both reverse chronological and functional resume formats, you’ll want to list the dates of your employment.

Whether you choose to list the month and year or only the year is up to you. If you’ve been with a company for five years, I tend to only list the years because a few extra months isn’t going to change the narrative.

Listing only years can also hide small gaps in your resume if you have them. There’s quite a bit of debate on the ethics of hiding these gaps, but here’s how I see it. I’ve seen many recruiters over the years penalize applicants for gaps that occurred six years ago.

There is absolutely no reason a gap six years ago should matter, let alone disqualify you from a phone interview or initial screening. So, sometimes I proactively choose to write years only on the resume so that it doesn’t. For me, it’s about risk mitigation. The bottom line is that you should do what feels right for you.

Also, know that you can break the rules for older jobs. I’ve written many resumes for individuals that worked at notable companies but it was fifteen years ago. If you’re writing a chronological resume, you could use a resume subtitle such as “Early Career Experience” or “Previous Experience” and list only the company and job title (without dates).

If you want to learn more about subtitles, read the article: 5 Resume Subtitles Your Resume Needs.

How to Write Dates for Overlapping Jobs

Every now and then (more often it seems these days) I encounter someone who is working multiple jobs or starts a job before they finish the last one. What do you do when your jobs overlap?

First things first. If you’re writing in chronological format, always list your most recent job first. Technically, you should probably call this reverse chronological, but I didn’t decide on the resume terminology. If you’re working multiple jobs at the same time, you get to choose which one comes first. I would lead with the most relevant job.

For example, I wrote a resume for someone last month who is working two jobs. One they’ve been working in since 2007 and the other they started last year. The one they started last year was very relevant to the target job for their resume. I chose to lead with that one, not the one they started in 2007. It’s not about when you started a job.

You could also break them up into different sections. For example, I had another individual who currently had a job but also had a relevant side hustle in the Web 3.0 space. Because they had great job stability, I didn’t want to break it up with the side hustle. But at the same time, I wanted to include it because it was industry relevant.

We chose to list his W2 jobs under the subtitle “Sales Experience” and then his freelance work under the subtitle “Web 3.0 Experience”. This made for a nice clean, easy-to-read resume.

Those are two ways that you could write dates for overlapping experiences. Of course, there are others, but many people will fall into one of those two options.

How to Write Dates for Education

Here are some acceptable resume date formats for your education.

1. May 2023 (Great choice if you graduated this year)

2. 2022 (Great choice if you graduated in the last few years)

3. Anticipated Graduation May 2024

4. Expected Graduation 2024

5. Graduation 2024

I’ve seen all of these formats used for education. Option one is my preferred way to write dates for education if you graduated this year because it tells the reader with certainty that you already have your degree and it’s not an anticipated degree later this year.

Option two is my typical go-to for education dates when you didn’t graduate this year.

Should You Write Dates for Education on Your Resume

While there’s no rule on whether you should include dates for your education, for some of us it makes a lot of sense.

This choice will depend on the narrative you want to project. I typically write education dates on resumes for recent college graduates. I want the recruiter to know that they’ve been in school for the past two years and that’s why there is limited job experience.

I don’t want them to think that I’m a 30-year-old lazy bum who’s only worked three jobs in ten years and lives on my parent’s sofa. That’s probably an extreme, but you get the idea.

On the other hand, age discrimination is very real. Whether it’s conscious or unconscious bias, it doesn’t matter. It’s real. And your job as the resume writer is to minimize all risks, including this one. Graduation dates are one of the most common ways for an employer to identify age without asking about it. For many professionals with several years of experience, I recommend removing dates for education.

There are exceptions to that. For example, I did what I jokingly call the nine-year degree program. I worked and went to school at the same time and slowly obtained my education. I graduated in my late 20’s.

Shortly after graduation, I made a career move into a new industry and I knew that they typically hired younger recent grads. In that case, I purposely put the dates of my education on my resume. I knew that the recruiter’s imagination would lead them to believe I was another younger recent grad that fit their hiring profile.

I ended up receiving an in-person interview and hit it off with the hiring manager. I later got that job. Did those dates get me the interview? Probably not. But they didn’t hurt my chances either.

Should You List Start Dates for Your Education

Sometimes I see resumes that show a degree followed by their start and graduation date. For the vast majority of us, I don’t think it’s anyone’s business how long it took you to finish your degree. What matters is that you have it.

On the other hand, if you were some super student that took 20 credit hours a semester and worked a part-time job, you may want to list the start date also to show the recruiter that you beasted your way through school. It could say something about your work ethic.

The bottom line is don’t include a start date for no reason. If you’re going to do it, do it because it serves some purpose.

Can an ATS Read All Date Formats

Anyone telling you to format dates a certain way for an applicant tracking system (ATS) is probably trying to sell you their ATS-compliant resume service or software. While there are hundreds of applicant tracking systems out there that I haven’t used, I’ve used a good handful of them over the years.

And what we’re really talking about here is the ability of an ATS to parse your data from a resume into fields in a database. These ATS companies spend a lot of money to hire good developers. Those developers spend a lot of time studying how people write dates on resumes so that they can code the ATS to recognize them. No one is going around trying to create software that can’t read your resume (Daxtra).

In my experience and when you apply some common sense, you’ll find that the ATS doesn’t care how you write dates on your resume. It’s safe to say every system will want to read the dates on your resume, but it won’t care about how you format the dates.

Should You Right Align Dates on a Resume

While there’s no rule that you have to right align the dates of your employment on a resume, it is common practice. Here are three reasons why I think it’s best to right align dates.

1. You always want to lead with the most important information in your resume. People read top to bottom in a left-to-right pattern. Your job titles and companies are more important than dates. By separating them, you ensure recruiters and hiring managers read the important information first - your job title and company information.

2. By right aligning your dates, you don’t crowd the other important information such as your positions and the companies that you’ve worked for.

3. It makes your resume more skimmable. Recruiters and hiring managers can skim down the right margin and see all your dates of employment. And I can tell you from experience managing recruitment teams, they all do this.

My advice is to right align the dates on your resume. Let’s discuss how to do this next.

How to Right Align Dates on Resume - Google Docs

I love Google Docs. In fact, it’s the application that I used to build my free resume templates that you can download. If you download my free templates, you won’t have to worry about right aligning your dates because it’s already done for you. But in case you need to make a change or you want to build your own resume, here’s how to right align dates in Google Docs with five easy steps.

1. Make sure you can see the ruler at the top of the page. If you can’t, go to “View” and then check “Show Ruler.”

2. Left-click on the ruler above your document and a pop-up window will appear. Click “Add right tab-stop.” This will add a tab stop position on the right.

3. Drag the right-tab stop arrow to where you want your text to end. This should line up with your right margin arrow.

4. Type your left-aligned text and hit the tab key.

5. Type your date and ba-boom, you have right-aligned dates on your resume.

How to Right Align Dates on Resume - Google Docs

How to Right Align Dates on Resume - Microsoft Word

For those of you using Microsoft Word, it’s a little more complicated. You can right align your dates of employement by following these 8 steps.

1. Go to the “Home” tab and make sure your text is set as “Align to left.”

2. Click the small arrow icon on the bottom left of the paragraph section to open the alignment and tab pop-up screen.

3. In the bottom right of the pop-up window, select “Tab Stop Options.”

4. In the next window, select the “Add” button to add a new tab stop.

5. In the postion box, type 6.2 and under the alignment box select right.

6. Hit the “Ok” button.

7. Type your left-aligned text and hit the tab key.

8. Type your date and ba-boom, you have right aligned dates on your resume.

How to Right Align Dates on Resume - Microsoft Word

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Cole Sperry has been a recruiter and resume writer since 2015, working with tens of thousands of job seekers, and hundreds of employers. Today Cole runs a boutique advisory firm consulting with dozens of recruiting firms and is the Managing Editor at OptimCareers.com.

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How to Align Dates on Resume Conclusion

Now you know how to align dates on your resume in as little as five easy steps. Plus you have all the information you need to make the best decisions about whether to list dates and how to list dates on your resume.

Now I want to hear from you.

Are you going to list dates on your resume for education? What format are you going to use? What was your biggest aha-moment from the article?

Let me know in the comments section below.

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