How to Hire Cleaning Employees for your business?

Hiring cleaners can be tricky!

As a maid service owner, your cleaners are the cornerstone of your business. They interact with your clients and it’s their job to provide the service that keeps those clients coming back for years to come.

But, finding and retaining good cleaners isn’t as simple as posting a job advert and hiring the first applicant. Vetting great workers and building a culture that employees want to be a part of takes time and effort. It doesn’t stop there either, as you then have to nurture those relationships to retain your A-players.

Learn How to Hire Cleaners from Gmaids’ CEO
Finding (And Using) The Right Hiring Channels
Common Problems in Your Hiring Process
Fixing Common Hiring Problems
Building and Maintaining Your Hiring Process

Learn How to Hire Cleaners from Gmaids’ CEO

We’ve unpacked the key learnings from Juan Chaparro’s insightful talk The Ultimate Guide to Hiring & Training Cleaning Employees, which took place at ZenMaid’s 2020 Maid Summit, to address these (and other) hiring concerns.

Juan is the CEO of Gmaids, the leading green cleaning service in Dallas since 2004. In 2020, Juan launched Pipehire, an all-in-one hiring and management software solution for cleaning business owners. The man clearly has a passion for the cleaning industry.

In this post, we’ll go over the best ways to market your cleaning jobs to attract the right employees. We’ll also look at how to create an internal culture that keeps your cleaners happy, thriving and in a position to help you scale your business.

Finally, we’ll address and solve common problems that maid services face when trying to systematize their hiring process. By the time you’re finished reading, you’ll know exactly how to hire cleaners and retain them.

Finding (And Using) The Right Hiring Channels

Finding the right people for your cleaning business means testing different strategies to see what works best for your specific business. With plenty of excellent options at your disposal, you’re sure to get a steady flow of leads to build a database of potential cleaners that you can continuously reach out to as and when you have new opportunities.

Posting in Free Facebook Groups

Most areas have local Facebook groups aimed at people who either work in a specific industry or are simply searching for jobs.

Do a quick Google search for Facebook groups for house cleaners. You can also look for local job search groups and join them.

Once you’ve found a few relevant groups whose members are the right audience for your jobs, create an advert in Facebook Jobs, write a clear job description and post it in your local Facebook groups.

Post on Indeed or Other Job Search Websites

Using specific job search websites like Indeed, Monster or even Craigslist, is another way to advertise your job posting. These platforms will expose your listing to a wide range of people. For the most part, they’ll charge only a nominal fee to keep your job up.

Use YouTube or Facebook Ads

If you have the budget to market your listing, creating YouTube or Facebook Ads can put your job in front of even more potential applicants. When creating these ads, make sure you only target people in your specific area. For the best results, take a look at the various zip codes that you service as well as your cleaners’ zip codes, and set up your ads to target those particular areas.

Build a Careers Page on Your Website

Create a specific page on your company’s website and list all of your current job postings. As a cleaning business, you should always have a job opening for new cleaners. This will enable you to continuously add to your pool of candidates and hire employees for your cleaning business faster.

Make sure that this page is professionally laid out and easy to access for prospective job candidates landing on your website. In the job ad itself, make a point of conveying the value that your job offers.

You need to sell future employees on your company’s value and culture, so they can decide whether it’s a good fit for them. Embedding an application form on the page will make it easy for them to express an interest in the job.

It also helps to include testimonials or videos from cleaners sharing positive experiences about working for your company.

If your cleaning business is in an area with a large Spanish speaking contingent, make sure that your job ads and application forms are available in both English and Spanish to accommodate all applicants.

Screenshot of Gmaid's website in Spanish

Once you receive an application for your job, make sure that you have a process in place to respond to those applicants as quickly as possible. You should aim to respond to a qualified applicant within 24 hours or less.

Ask Your Current Cleaners for Referrals

Ask the A-player cleaners on your team if they know of other people who might be interested in working for your company. Offering a bonus for recommending someone who stays at the company for more than 90 days will incentivize your staff members to only refer other committed cleaners.

Build a List of Potential Candidates

As you collect applications, make sure that you save the ones from the people you didn’t hire. Over the months and years, these candidates’ situations would likely have changed. They might have gained previous cleaning experience, for example, making them a potential cleaner for further down the line.

While you’re at it, collect your non-hires’ email addresses as well. That way you can send out email campaigns to them whenever you have a new job opportunity. Remember to ask them for referrals and suggest that they pass the job ad along to anyone they think would be a good fit.

Common Problems in Your Hiring Process

Once you have a hiring process in place, it’s essential that you continue to refine the system and identify room for improvement. This will ensure that you’re always finding the best candidates and creating an environment that encourages them to stay with your business long term.

Here are some indications that you need to re-engineer the way you are hiring.

You Manually Enter Candidates Into a Spreadsheet

When you first start hiring, you might defer to a trusty old spreadsheet to keep track of your candidates. If you’re manually entering the applicants’ information you should definitely look into ways to streamline this process.

Remember, it’s impossible to scale anything that you are doing manually.

As your business continues to grow and you receive even more applicants, it’s going to take that much longer to not only enter all of this information into a spreadsheet, but keep it organized enough to streamline your process.

The CEO Is the Only Person Doing the Hiring

If the CEO is the only person looking at resumés and reaching out to candidates, it can create a bottleneck in the hiring process.

If you’re at a point where you’re spending most of your time setting up interviews and combing through resumés and applications, it’s time to either hire a virtual assistant (VA) or use software that will streamline this process for you (more on that further down).

You Take Too Long to Reply to Candidates

Good candidates, especially A-players, won’t waste time on a company that isn’t sure about hiring them. Once you identify a great candidate, you need to reach out to them as quickly as possible to avoid losing them. You don’t want to miss out on a great hire because your competitor was able to interview them first.

How do you fix these issues quickly and easily in a way that will help your company grow? We go into that next.

Fixing Common Hiring Problems

The most impactful way to fix your hiring process is to learn how to hire the right employees for your cleaning business. You then have to create an environment that will help you retain the best cleaners. Once you understand what to look for and how to nurture these relationships, it becomes easier to build a replicable process to grow your business.

Learn How to Identify A, B and C-Player Cleaners

You should always aim to hire A-player cleaners. These are experienced workers who won’t settle for anything less than the best job. They have references you can call, they ask relevant questions during the interview and they express an interest in your company’s culture and values.

Hiring A-players will help your company grow, because they are committed to staying with you long term. Since they are in it for the duration, they will also help you find better clients, retain more clients and provide outstanding service.

B-players are looking for a good opportunity. They tend to have some previous experience and will provide a few references. These candidates are open to multiple offers and might not be as committed or interested in your company culture as A-players. That said, they still pride themselves on doing a good job.

C-players are looking for any job they can find. They generally have less experience than A or B-players and might not have any references for you to reach out to. Along with being less invested in your company, these candidates will always be looking for other jobs on the side.

A and B-players are in it for the long run, while C-players tend to come and go. Hiring mostly C-players makes focusing on business growth more of a challenge, as much of your time will be spent replacing cleaners as they find other roles.

Make It as Easy as Possible for People to Apply

Your application form should be accessible from your job ad. While it might be tempting to ask as many questions as possible in this form, try to streamline it by requesting only the information you need in order to decide if the candidate is worth interviewing. An overly complicated form might also deter A-players from filling it out.

Examples of personal info questions on a hiring form

Take a look at Gmaid’s website to see how easy they make it for new cleaners to apply for jobs. The form fits on one page and candidates can easily see what information is required in order for them to apply.

Create a Company Culture to Retain A-Players

A-players stick around when they feel appreciated and have a sense that they’ll be able to grow and advance their career. Creating a company culture that retains A-players requires prioritizing family advancement opportunities, continuing education, workshops, bonuses and even random acts of kindness for your employees.

Creating opportunities for your cleaners, such as financial workshops to help them manage their paychecks or ways for them to gain new skills, will foster an environment of growth that they’ll want to remain a part of.

At Gmaids, Juan and his team regularly bring in chiropractors to teach their cleaners how to improve posture and protect their bodies while working. They also offer a variety of workshops to help them grow their skills and learn new things.

Building and Maintaining Your Hiring Process

Although many maid owners launch their business by bootstrapping and doing most of the work themselves, this DIY approach can only get you so far. At a certain point, you need to establish processes to hire people that will help you grow your business beyond just yourself.

You might be wondering how exactly you build out a system that incorporates all of the steps and advice we went over in this article. Well, you can choose to build it yourself using spreadsheets or to piece it together with different software.

However, if you want to save time and focus on other things, you should look at using an all-in-one hiring and management platform designed specifically for cleaning businesses.

As Gmaids grew, Juan began documenting all of the systems he and his team used to scale their hiring process and used that information to create a solution that would help hundreds of maid service companies just like theirs.

This is how Pipehire was born.

It’s an all-in-one hiring and management software solution designed specifically for cleaning businesses. It lets business owners track applicants, onboarding and current employee performance all in one place.

From the screenshot above, you can see that Pipehire creates an employee dashboard that houses all of your applicants’ and employees’ information within the management system. The tool also calculates recruitment scores for each candidate based on their application responses, making it much easier to identify the most qualified candidates.

You can build specific application forms for different positions, such as office jobs, cleaning jobs and more. Pipehire also has a prebuilt background check system and onboarding checklist, allowing you to easily collect everything you need from an employee before they start.

Pipehire’s integrated and easy-to-use tracking system keeps tabs on all of the things we mentioned, allowing you to create a database of candidates as well as manage your current cleaners.

Knowing how to hire great employees for your cleaning business (and understanding what to look for in potential candidates) is an acquired skill. It takes a lot of practice if you’re not used to it.

It can be easy to get stuck in a loop of creating job posts, manually vetting applicants and spending hours organizing and sifting through information. If this describes you, then it’s crucial to find another way to go about finding and hiring top talent.

Hopefully this article has helped you better understand how to simplify the process of identifying and hiring the best talent and implement systems that free up your time as a business owner to focus on other aspects of your brand.

This talk first aired at the 2020 Maid Service Success Summit.

The Maid Summit is an annual online event that brings together the most successful leaders in the cleaning industry, like Debbie Sardone, Angela Brown, Courtney Wisely, Amy Caris, Chris Schwab and more. Get free access to masterclasses and workshops that will help you to grow, scale and automate your cleaning business so you can get more leads and create more profit. Make sure you’re on our email list to find out how to get free tickets to the next event.

Remember to watch Juan’s talk from the 2020 Maid Summit to learn more about how he created a foolproof hiring process for cleaning businesses.

Hosted by ZenMaid, the event was created specifically for maid service companies and features over 40 talks from business owners and industry experts. Check out the full replays of these talks to see how you can grow your own cleaning business.

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