How to Find and Hire Employees for Your Janitorial Business

To drive growth for your commercial janitorial business, you need to hire more employees. And not just any employees—your company needs high-quality cleaners who roll up their sleeves and make the place shine.

Read on to learn how to find employees for your janitorial business and how to hire cleaning employees.

How to find janitorial employees

Wondering how to find cleaning employees? In today’s competitive job market, discovering top talent requires a proactive approach with both creative and tried-and-true recruitment strategies, like the following:

Write a captivating job advertisement

The job listing serves as a first impression of your business. A comprehensive job description should include the following basic elements:

• Job title

• Company overview

• Job responsibilities

• Job requirements

• Years of experience desired

• Typical hours (full-time, part-time, or contract)

• Background check and drug screening requirements 

• Benefits offered

But beyond the essentials, make your job advertisement stand out from the competition with these tips:

• Include compensation details or a salary range. According to an Indeed survey, one in four job seekers list compensation as the most important part of a job description.

• Go beyond the basic benefits. If you offer health insurance and a 401K, state that in the job advertisement, but also list any extra perks, such as gym memberships, career advancement opportunities, and sign-on bonuses.

• Use inclusive language to attract a diverse range of candidates.

Share job openings on LinkedIn 

LinkedIn allows hiring managers to post jobs for free. They can then view the profiles of applicants. While some consider LinkedIn recruiting to be more for white-collar jobs, LinkedIn has broadened its focus and aims to cater to all job recruiters and seekers. For a free job posting, it’s worth a try.

Utilize job posting sites

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. In addition to LinkedIn, post your job openings on various job boards, like Glassdoor, Indeed, Monster, and Craigslist. Social media networking websites like Facebook also allow job posts. The more places you share your job listing, the more applicants you will attract. You can also pay to have your job postings promoted to job seekers.

Attend job fairs

Job fairs allow you to speak directly with job seekers to see if they’re a good fit for your open roles. Make sure your booth design stands out, and staff your booth with social employees to attract the most job searchers attending the fair. After the job fair, don’t delay in reaching out to candidates. 

Leverage your local newspaper

Placing an ad in the classifieds allows you to target locally, and most newspapers list job boards online, too. While newspaper ads yield a smaller candidate pool, you’ll likely face less competition.

Ask existing employees

If satisfied with their jobs, employees serve as your biggest advocates in finding cleaning employees. Ask them to share your job openings with people they know. To incentivize them, consider offering a referral bonus if you hire someone they recommend for the job.

Work with a recruiter

When you’re hiring cleaning employees, it’s because your company needs help with its workload. The process of recruiting, interviewing, and hiring employees takes a considerable amount of time. Lighten your load by working with a recruiter who can target the best candidates and bring them directly to you. Whether for recruitment, weeding out first-round applicants, or conducting interviews, recruiters help with every step of the hiring process.

How to hire janitorial employees

Finding candidates is the first step, but hiring the right employees for your cleaning business proves critical. According to Glassdoor, the average company in the United States spends about $4,000 to hire a new employee, taking up to 52 days to fill a position. Hiring the wrong person costs businesses time and money, which is why hiring managers need to take their time finding the right fit for their commercial janitorial companies. 

Follow these steps to successfully hire cleaning employees:

Review all applicants

Start by reviewing all the job applicants and deciding which ones to advance to the next round. Remember what matters most to you when screening applicants, whether it be years of experience, soft skills, or enthusiasm for the job.

Coordinate and conduct interviews

Set up interviews with your top candidates. Prepare a list of open-ended questions that will give you the information you need to hire someone. For ideas, check out Indeed’s list of cleaner interview questions, which includes:

• What cleaning products and tools are you familiar with?

• What is your approach to cleaning while customers are around?

• Do you have a checklist to confirm the quality of your work before you leave a job, and if so, what are the key steps?

Don’t forget to take notes during the interview. 

Run a background check

If it’s part of your hiring process, you may conduct background checks before advancing candidates after the job interview. Some companies wait until the conditional job offer phase to run background checks. Candidates must consent to the background check.

Ask for references

A background check won’t uncover whether your candidate shows up to work on time, improves employee morale, or communicates effectively. For those answers, you need to ask the candidate for references and then follow up with the references to ask any questions you have about the candidate.

Follow up with candidates

At this point, you’ve likely narrowed your candidate pool down to your top picks but need a little help deciding which one to extend the offer to. Communicate with your candidates to let them know where you are in the process, and request another interview if you need more information. You can bring in other team members for this interview to allow them to weigh in as well.

Extend an offer

With the hard work out of the way, all that’s left to do is extend the offer. Once they sign the offer, it’s time to start training. Congratulations on the new hire!

Onboard your new employee

Whether or not someone is successful in their job often comes down to the onboarding and training they received, so be mindful when onboarding new employees. Introduce the new hire to other staff, and consider assigning them a mentor to help them get up to speed.

Have your new hires train with different teams and on multiple cleaning jobs so they learn about all kinds of different scenarios. Give them plenty of training on using your janitorial software. You want to set them up for success, so encourage them to ask questions or make suggestions. 

Janitorial hiring tips 

Hiring and retention go hand-in-hand. Follow these best practices to hire and retain the best employees for your cleaning business:

• To attract the right applicants, consider the type of person you want to hire when writing your job description.

• Decide whether part-time, full-time, or contract is right for your business.

• Make the application process easy by asking only for the information you need to decide whether a candidate deserves an interview. 

• Brush up on the legal requirements for hiring employees.

• Implement an efficient hiring process. The best candidates are likely interviewing multiple places, and you don’t want your competitors to extend an offer first. Learn best practices for boosting business efficiency.

• Empower employees with the tools they need to get more commercial cleaning clients.

Find and hire top talent

The process and tips above help business owners find and hire employees for their janitorial businesses. But when it comes to boosting productivity, your company must have systems in place to streamline routine tasks and allow everyone to focus on their specific job duties. That’s where Aspire janitorial business software comes in. 

This comprehensive software solution provides janitorial companies with the tools to streamline the job scheduling process—reducing inefficiencies, staffing issues, and payroll inaccuracies.

The employee scheduling features keep everyone in the business—from the office to the field—in sync and on task. Signed contracts are automatically converted into work tickets, which can be added to the schedule board with simple drag-and-drop functionality. And the platform allows employees to create quick tickets from the mobile app if a customer wants to add services. 

With comprehensive data, janitorial business owners are equipped to make decisions that affect their bottom line, such as:

• How many team members to send to a job

• How to build optimized schedules and routes

• Whether to invest in cleaning tools that speed up processes or send more people to a job

The data available in Aspire also helps empower productivity across the business. With access to data, anyone on your team can acquire the information they need to optimize the business from their role. From in-the-field scheduling to job costing data that protects profit margins, Aspire’s all-in-one business software solution sets janitorial companies up for long-term success.