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How to List Employers that Have Merged or Been Acquired

If you’ve worked for a company that’s been merged or acquired, naming every entity on resumes is important. The reason for specifying mergers and acquisitions is perception. Background and credit checks will turn up those company names, and if your resume doesn’t mention them, it sends up a red flag for your potential employer!

It’s possible you had multiple positions with a single company that changed names a number of times. Do you list all company names and position titles or just the most recent?

Here’s an example to help explain how you might handle this situation in a resume:

Upon graduating from college, I went to work for Company A. Several years later, Company A was acquired by Company B. More years passed, and Company B was acquired by Company C. Eventually, Company C merged with Company D, and as a result, after ten years with the four companies, I was laid off.

My question is how best to handle this work history on my resume? I worked for four different corporate entities, with four different names, without ever changing jobs. Do I list all four on my resume? Or just the last one?

Always try to show an upward track record — that you acquired new knowledge and skills, and didn’t just do the same thing over and over each year. And, you don’t want the reader to assume that you worked for only one company that laid you off after a decade.

Taking these two factors into consideration, can you show correlation between your job titles and responsibilities with the changes in ownership? If yes, identify all four owners:

Job title, Company D (formerly Company C), years

Job title, Company C (formerly Company B), years

Job title, Company B (formerly Company A), years

Job title, Company A, years

If you can’t show an upward track record that correlates with changes in ownership, just use the current owner name with a short explanation:

Job title, Company D, years

(Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, the entities for which I have worked since college graduation were known as Company A, Company B, and Company C.)

The reason for naming every entity is perception. Background and credit checks will turn up those company names, and if your resume doesn’t mention them, it sends up a red flag for your potential employer!