Ambiguous dates produce the wrong years of experience

“Minimum five years of experience” is not usually assessed by a human. It is a filter run against a number the system calculated by parsing your date ranges and adding up the gaps.

If the dates do not parse, that number is wrong, and you never learn that it was wrong.

What goes wrong

Mixed formats. March 2021 – Present in one role and 06/2018 - 02/2021 in another. Each is fine alone; together they signal to the parser that its format guess is unreliable, and some implementations discard the less confident matches.

Year only. 2021 – 2023 cannot distinguish a two-month contract from a full two years. Parsers typically assume January to January, which can inflate or deflate your tenure by up to eleven months per role.

Ambiguous numerics. 03/04/2021 is March 4th in the United States and April 3rd nearly everywhere else. Avoid day-level precision entirely.

Unusual dashes. An em dash surrounded by no spaces (Mar 2021—Present) sometimes merges into the adjacent token. En dash with spaces is safest, and a plain hyphen is safer still.

Missing end dates. A role with a start and no end is treated as either current or malformed, depending on the system.

The format to use

Mar 2021 – Present
Jun 2018 – Feb 2021

Three-letter month, four-digit year, spaced en dash or the word “to”, Present for current roles. Use it for every role, every education entry, and every certification, without exception.

Where to put them

On the same line as the job title and employer, not in a separate column and not in a table cell. See tables for what happens otherwise.

Gaps

Do not disguise a career gap by dropping months and showing years only. Parsers do not evaluate gaps; recruiters do, and year-only dates read as evasive to a person while simultaneously corrupting your tenure calculation. You lose twice.