Looking for the best help in the business? Here’s some advice on how to hire janitorial employees who will add both value and character to your cleaning company.
Hiring qualified talent is harder than it seems in any industry. The way a candidate appears on paper my be very different from how they come across in an interview, which may still yet be different from how they perform on the job. Even hiring managers with years of experience who know how to hire janitorial employees can get tripped up in the recruiting and hiring process.
No matter if you’re a first time or 100th time hiring manager, sifting through candidates can be a challenging and frustrating experience. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be. There are certain things you can keep in mind as you source, interview, and onboard candidates that will help you hone in on the right candidates sooner. And once you learn how to hire janitorial employees efficiently, you’ll take those skills with you for life.
If you’re curious about how to hire janitorial employees who will fit with your business, you have to start at the source. In this case, the source is two-fold: where you post jobs and where you look for candidates.
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How to hire janitorial employees: an easy 4-step process
1. Where to advertise
Job posting is a critical part of finding qualified candidates. The first place you’ll want to post your job is your website. When cleaners are looking for work, they often search for local cleaning companies on the web and visit their websites. If you advertise your openings on job sites, but not on your website, it can confuse candidates. (Is the job still open? Was it ever open?) This can lead to lost prospects.
Posting to your website also means there’s a good chance a popular job site like Indeed.com will pick up the ad. You might also consider posting to Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, SnagAJob.com, and Craigslist (though be prepared for a lot of volume with Craigslist). If you belong to any cleaning associations or other networking groups, those are great places to advertise, as well as on your social media accounts.
2. Incentivize
Posting jobs, however, is usually not enough on its own. (Not for hiring the best, anyway.) If you want top-notch help, incentives are a useful tool for how to hire janitorial employees. Incentives do two things: They attract people to your opening, and they weed out the people who are more interested in the benefits than the work itself.
For example, if you advertise four weeks of paid vacation, you’ll likely get more people than if you advertise only two. Then when it’s time to interview, if someone references the incentive as a primary reason for applying, you’ll know that their focus is on something other than the job that needs to be done.
Some great incentives today are generous paid vacation time (one of the least expensive benefits you can offer), sign-on bonuses, subsidized health benefits, health and dependent care flexible spending accounts, and subsidized transportation. Other incentives include career development and training as well as opportunities for advancement.
3. The interview
When you’re thinking about how to hire janitorial employees who blow the others out of the water, the interview needs to be one of the most important steps. This is your opportunity to see how this person might fit with your business.
Make sure to ask questions not only about their cleaning skills, but also about the places they’ve worked before, the organizational structure, the candidate’s relationship with their manager, and reason for leaving. Be on the lookout for vague answers, lack of eye contact, and negative comments, as they can be red flags. Ask open-ended questions to build a more complete profile of your candidates.
Remember always to avoid asking illegal questions, including questions about race, ethnicity, gender, family status, health status, political views, and anything else that might be construed as a discriminatory question. When in doubt, don’t ask.
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4. Onboarding that shows you care
Once you know how to hire janitorial employees who perfectly compliment your business, you want to make sure that you set them up to succeed from the beginning. A day of onboarding that includes introductions to company employees, an outline of day-to-day procedures, conversational activities, and other resources for a smooth initiation counts for so much when training new hires. If you’ve gone to the trouble of finding them, you want to make sure they stay!
The bottom line is that if a candidate feels as though you care about them as a person as much as an employee, you’re more likely to find the ones whose primary concern is doing a good job. Commercial cleaning may not be everyone’s dream job, but the people who perform the best are the people who are dedicated to their work. That should be the number one thing you look for at all times. Evaluating work ethic and cultural fit are crucial for hiring janitorial employees that rock!