Hiring employees for your cleaning business is not as easy as you might think. Most employers, just like us, go through many trials and errors before they find out what exactly they are looking for, where to look and how to close the deal once they find what they want.
Whether you’re someone who has never hired anyone before or someone who wants to optimize their hiring process, this guide has everything you need to find your next best all-star professional cleaner.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this guide –
- Defining what you want and need
- Where to look for it
- Maid to Glow’s personal hiring process
- Interview tips that help weed out the best of the best.
- What to do after you hire someone
Define What you Want
The first step to hiring employees for your cleaning business is defining what you want. Define what your ideal cleaner looks like.
Of course, you’ll never find perfection, but it shouldn’t stop you from hiring employees that may not be the best right now but have the potential to be great down the line.
Defining what you want helps set a standard you can use to qualify potential employees against. You might not find your ideal, but you’ll find the next best option, and that’s more than enough.
Regular Cleaning Employees vs Independent Contractors
If you don’t already know the differences between a regular cleaning employee and an independent contractor, now’s a good time to familiarize yourself with it.
1. Experienced or Inexperienced
Personally, at Maid to Glow we go for experienced contractors. Sure, it may take us more to find that person and cost us more to hire them, but it’s worth it in the long term.
An experienced cleaner would already know how to do their job. They’ll also be familiar with industry norms, thus easier to communicate and manage.
2. Hourly or Flat Pay Rate
We’ve tried both hourly and flat pay rates with our employees, and to be honest, nothing has really worked out until we changed our pay model to percentage-based income.
That means we pay 50-60% of what we charge our customers to our cleaning employees. This is the only pay model that has worked out well for us. We also saw a significant decline in customer complaints since shifting to this pay model.
However, you may not be in a position to implement a percentage-based pay right now, so feel free to experiment with hourly and flat pay rates.
3. Where to Find Cleaners?
The following are some of the ways and channels through which you can find cleaning employees:
- Job boards – Indeed, LinkedIn, Monster, Facebook job boards, Craigslist, etc.
- Facebook groups, subreddits, forums and communities.
- Existing network or referrals.
Our personal favorites for finding and hiring employees for our cleaning business are Facebook job boards and Indeed. We usually also promote the job posting, which means spending some money on it, but it makes the process easier and faster, so it’s worth it.
Job Posting Tips
If you create a low quality job post, that’s the kind of people you’ll attract. So, it’s really important that you create a well-written, detailed job post that clearly explains the following –
- Job responsibilities
- Qualifications and requirements
- Benefits and potential payout
- Your company and its vision
Here’s the exact job description that we at Maid to Glow use. You can use it for inspiration and create a similar job description.
Outline a Hiring Process
Every business and every company has a hiring process, and you must have one too. The following are the different stages in a hiring process that most, including us, use to hire new cleaning employees/contractors.
1. Application Process & Screening
This is the stage where candidates will send in their applications, which would include their resume, cover letter and other relevant information if any.
As an employer, you will screen most, if not all, of the applications to choose a few candidates for the next round.
2. First Interview
In the first interview, you wanna find out as much as you can about the person to see if they match your expectations of what you’re looking for. More on interview tips later in this article.
3. Background and Reference Check
Don’t forget to cross-check the references they give to see if they are legit and run a background check on them. We use Background Solutions for it.
4. Second Interview
Depending on how you carry out operations, the second interview may vary from how others do it.
We always do a second interview to go over our Maid to Glow’s handbook and make sure we clear all doubts and questions they might have to finalize everything.
Interview Tips
These quick tips will help you tremendously in your interview process to find out what the other person wants from you by working with you. Ideally, you should be able to create a win-win situation for both.
1. Traits to look for
During the interview, directly or indirectly look for these traits:
- Work ethic
- Go-getter
- Punctual
- Coachable
- Teamwork
- Handling pressure
2. Short-term or Long-term Opportunity
Find out if they are looking for a long-term working opportunity or will they only work for a few months before bouncing and starting their own cleaning business.
There’s nothing wrong with either of the two, but you should know it ahead of time.
How will you find that out?
Ask questions, which brings us to the last point.
3. Ask, Listen and Talk Less
Ask questions that help you know their motivations and goals, either directly or indirectly. Also, really listen and observe to truly gauge the underlying message and subtleties behind what they say.
Especially, ask them about their experiences, how they handle certain situations, how comfortable they are having a conversation with customers and possibly deal with conflicts.
What to Do Now?
So, now you know how the process of hiring employees for your cleaning business works. But what after that?
After we choose our final candidate and hire them, there are a couple of things we always do – train our cleaning staff and have them perform a mock cleaning for us where we pretend to be the customer from start to finish.
And that’s it. That’s pretty much how you hire an employee for a cleaning business.
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