“Minimum two years’ experience on reach trucks.”
It is in thousands of job ads. It is in agency search filters. And when a CV says "three years on reach trucks", it often decides who gets a call back and who does not.
We think it deserves much less weight than it gets.
What the research says about years
In 2022, Sackett and colleagues revised the main research estimates on how well different selection methods predict overall job performance. On their figures, years of job experience has an average validity of 0.07. The earlier, widely cited estimate from 1998 was 0.18. For comparison, structured interviews average 0.42.
Validity is a correlation between what a method says about candidates and how they later perform. 0 means no relationship. So 0.07 is close to nothing.
Two honest caveats, because they matter:
- These are averages across many studies, mostly outside the Netherlands and across many occupations. Results vary.
- The number is about years as a predictor on its own. It says nothing against licences, certificates or safety training, which matter for working safely and legally regardless.
Why years get so much weight anyway
Years are easy. On a busy screening day, a date range on a CV turns into a number in two seconds, and a number feels objective. It is also easy to put in a job ad, easy for an agency to filter on, and easy to defend: "we asked for two years, they had two years."
But "three years on reach trucks" can mean very different things. Three years moving pallets at floor level, or three years putting away at twelve metres. Three years in a site with strict pre use checks, or three years where nobody checked anything. Three years with one incident, or three years with several. The number hides exactly the part you care about.
What a years filter costs you
A hard filter on years does two things at once. It lets through people whose years tell you little. And it screens out people without testing anything, including some who might do the job well.
That second effect is easy to miss, because you never see the people you filtered out. In a market where most occupational groups are tight, it is worth asking whether a years filter is protecting quality, or just shrinking your pool.
We should be careful here too. For roles where skills are learned on the job, the research on how well structured methods work for inexperienced applicants is thin; the researchers themselves say they cannot yet tell. So we are not claiming that dropping the years filter automatically finds better people. We are saying the filter is weaker evidence than it looks.
Ask about the work instead
Our view: treat "three years on reach trucks" as the start of a question, not an answer.
Instead of checking the number, ask every candidate the same questions about the work itself. For example:
- How did you do the work? "Describe the last time you operated a reach truck. What kind of warehouse was it, and what heights did you work at?"
- What equipment and processes did you use? "Which types of trucks have you operated, and what did a normal shift look like?"
- What checks or standards did you work under? "How did you check the truck before use, and what safety rules did your site have?"
These questions are illustrations, not a validated assessment. Write your own, tied to your site's requirements, and decide in advance what a strong, acceptable and weak answer looks like How to Run Structured Interviews at High Volume.
Those answers are still the candidate's own account. The certificate still needs to be verified, and competence can be demonstrated where that is safe and proportionate. But you will learn far more from three good questions than from one date range.
For staffing agencies
If you screen for clients, the years filter is often written into the order. It is worth a conversation. Ask the client's site supervisor what actually decides whether a reach truck driver works out on their site. Then screen for that, and send the client the evidence, not just the years.
Closing thought
Experience matters. It is context, it often comes with skills, and for some work it comes with certificates you cannot do without. But the number of years is a label, not evidence.
So here is a question for your next job ad: if you removed the years requirement and replaced it with three questions about the work, what would you learn that you do not know now?
Read next: Structured vs Unstructured Interviews: What the Research Shows, and What It Does Not explains the research behind these numbers in more depth.
The full evidence is in "A New Standard for Frontline Hiring" white paper download page.