Hello, we hope you guys are having a great week so far! Today we wanted to talk about a less-than-common topic which is hiring house cleaners for your maid service in Dallas.
This is why we wanted to create a special article where we discuss all we know about hiring new staff as a cleaning company. Not only we’re sharing our best tips to get professional, qualified, and highly skilled professional house cleaners, but we’ve also contacted several cleaning companies in the Dallas/Fort-Worth area for their input.
There are many maid services with plenty of experience in this field, and we find their knowledge and advice incredibly insightful and helpful.
Before continuing, we want to thank our fellow cleaning companies in the DFW area that collaborated with us for creating this article, with their invaluable insights and tips.
What Will You Find In This Guide?
In this article, we will discuss how many resources it takes for hiring house cleaners, including human resources, monetary resources, and time. We will compare different hiring methods and procedures to find out the most effective ones.
We’ve written articles in the past with tips for hiring house cleaners in Dallas but this is a more extensive guide with the collaboration of other companies.
Related: 7 Ways to Know You Are Hiring the Best Maid Service In Dallas
We hope this helps you, as a fellow business owner, because hiring new staff is always a challenge, especially if you’re just getting started on your cleaning company. You risk hiring employees that are unreliable, unskilled, dishonest, or just spending too much time, money, and energy in the process.
In this guide, all the methods that we mention will give you a better understanding of how much it is costing you right now to hire a new house cleaner and learn how to find the most cost-effective solution for your company.
We recommend that you grab an agenda, make a list of pros and cons for each method, and choose one or more methods that you will try until you find your best fit.
The Cost of Hiring House Cleaners in Dallas
We spoke to several cleaning services in the Dallas/Fort Worth area to see what their preferred hiring strategies are. And we also posed them with a question:
“What’s your acquisition cost for each new hire? “
This is a great question because if you know exactly how much it costs you right now to hire a new employee, then you will know if other alternatives are more cost-efficient than your current one.
Keep in mind that the recruitment process is long, and it has many steps before they start working: from creating the ad itself, to sorting out potential candidates, interviews, and training. Along the way, many of your potential candidates will not be able to continue through the hiring process for whatever reason.
Insights From Our Fellow Cleaning Companies
Thanks to the insights from our fellow cleaning companies, we’ve heard that the acquisition cost goes anywhere from $0 and goes as high as $1000. This depends mostly on the platform that is used, but each comes with pros and cons (which we explain below).
Now, this is obviously a huge margin! $0 or $1000 is a huge difference in your budget, especially if you are getting started with your cleaning business.
Based on the seven cleaning businesses that collaborated with us, the average cost we got was $264 for each new hire. A higher cost is usually associated with online recruitment platforms or external recruitment services, but this could end up being actually cheaper than free recruitment options.
Keep this in mind: time is also a huge money investment. Free alternatives usually offer a lot of applicants, but the pool is so wide that you will invest a lot of time and energy filtering the best applicants. Recruitment services can represent a monetary cost, but they do most of the filter process for you and offer potential employees according to your needs and requirements.
We will go through each recruitment platform down below where you can compare the pros and cons.
Using Hiring and Recruitment Platforms
There are many online platforms maid services can use for hiring house cleaners, such as Craigslist, LinkedIn, and Indeed. They have a massive reach and are well-known. Indeed and Craigslist are paid, while LinkedIn is free with a “promoted” paid alternative.
The cost for posting a hiring ad on Craigslist is $45 per category (you can choose more than one) in the Dallas area. LinkedIn uses a pay-per-click method, which means that they will charge you whenever an applicant clicks on your job ad.
Indeed was one of the most popular options for our fellow cleaning companies.
“We use Indeed exclusively, we run Indeed ads” says Ginger from Love My Maids, a home cleaning service in Arlington, Fort Worth. To Ginger, Indeed is more effective than hiring using word of mouth (i.e., hiring house cleaners that are friends or family of your current ones).
“We receive enough applicants through indeed, though the ad spend can be costly if we are trying to hire quickly.” Adds Drew from Prairie Maids House Cleaning, a cleaning service in Grand Prairie, TX.
As for DFW Cleaning Co., a premium cleaning service serving the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, “we’ve used Indeed in the past, Facebook posts, and Craigslist before, and word of mouth too”.
LinkedIn charges around 5$ per click, but this varies depending on the type of job, location, etc. However, LinkedIn is a platform that is oriented toward professionals with a higher level of academic education. Therefore, it is not an ideal platform to search for professional cleaners for your maid service.
Hiring House Cleaners With Social Media
Social media, mainly Facebook, is a great way of reaching potential employees. The most common routes is to post Jobs using the Facebook Jobs platform, or to post ads on private or public Facebook groups. You also have the option of paid Facebook or Instagram Ads.
On Facebook, you can find many groups that are created to help people learn about work offers in their area. In this case, search for Facebook groups in the Dallas/Fort-Worth area.
The demand can be really high. The profile of the worker you’re searching for does match the use of Facebook, both as a work finder and as a social media platform.
However, here is the downside: because pretty much everyone can apply to your job offer, you are going to have a massive number of applicants that you will have to sort out on your own.
This brings us back to the original issue because you will still have a significant number of resources for sorting out your applicants, either time and energy (doing it by yourself) or money (by hiring a recruiter to do it for you).
The cost of using Facebook or Instagram Ads depends on the number of people they reach. Same as hiring platforms, the cost is pay-per-click and it varies depending on the area.
“We hire people from Facebook groups, but it is a hit and miss”, says Samuel from HomeMaid Cleaners, a house cleaning and maid service in Dallas, TX.
While at Prairie Maids, they use “local Facebook groups and Facebook mom groups”, among other recruitment techniques.
Saul from Family Cleaning Services, a professional cleaning service in Grand Prairie, TX, uses Facebook posts as well as Instagram posts.
Using an External Recruiter Specialized in Hiring House Cleaners
Another option is to hire an external recruiter (whether that’s a person or company), especially one with experience in the cleaning industry. This recruiter is not part of your payroll, but it is rather a 3rd-party service.
No strategy is perfect, but this one offers many advantages when compared to cons.
Money is certainly an important factor to consider here. However, consider that hiring specialized services is, in a way, a much safe investment than trying to do it on your own. This is because they already have the experience and the optimized procedure for hiring.
An external recruiter takes care of both finding potential candidates and filtering them according to the profile you are looking for. You might be looking for housekeepers with certain years of experience in the cleaning business, or that have trained others, for example.
Next, if you decide on looking for an external recruiter, you come across the challenge of finding a good one. This is no different than any other product or service that you acquire: you have to make an informed decision first. Start by checking whether this person or company has an online presence. This includes a website, or a profile on Yelp, Google, or Angi.
Many freelancers work as recruiters, so check their services at Upwork, Fiverr, or Freelancer. In this case, it might be harder to find recruiters that specialize in cleaners. The good thing about these platforms is that they include ratings and comments from previous clients, just like Google or Yelp.
Make sure they are clear about what they offer, what they do not offer, and what is the cost of the service and the payment options (e.g., is it a fixed cost per new applicant? Is it a monthly subscription?
Having Your Own House Cleaner Recruiter
This could be helpful if you are growing very rapidly as a company. This means that your current workers are happy with your company and stay with you and that your growing business needs more people to hire on top.
However, if you are not expanding and are instead struggling to hire new people constantly in order to replace quitters, you should find out first why is this happening. In this situation, it is not ideal to hire a recruiter.
The turnover rate is extremely expensive for your company, in all areas: money, time, and energy. This also impacts your reputation as a company: no one wants to work with a cleaning company where cleaners don’t last more than a month.
The longer your employees stick to the same customer, the more trust they will have in your service. After having the same cleaners for months (or years) the chances of them switching companies are much lower.
Besides, the longer your employees stay with you, the more you will get to know them as professionals. This means that you will be able to work on their weaknesses and polish up their strengths. All with proper guidance and management, of course.
The other option for having your own recruiter is to have you or someone from your staff take the role of a recruiter. Although this has some benefits (you won’t have to hire someone new, and the role can be “active” only when needed), it will take some time nonetheless, especially if that “temporal” recruiter is not familiar with this process.
Besides, it will take time away from this person to fulfill their everyday tasks. Make sure that this person has plenty of time available to dedicate their time to this process.
The Process of Hiring House Cleaners
As we mentioned earlier, there are many steps that you have to consider for the hiring process. The purpose of this list is to remind you of every step of this process, considering that every part will demand resources from your company, whether it’s time, money, or energy. A basic hiring process includes:
- Creating the ad (whether that is written or with a flyer),
- Reviewing and sorting the first batch of applicants,
- Contacting them and/or interviewing them,
- Inviting the final candidates for training with a senior cleaner and/or supervisor,
- And, repeating the process.
Creating the job ad
Creating the ad is not hard, but you need to think carefully about what you are including here. You want to go straight to the point and let them know what you are looking for, what requisites are a must, and what you are offering as a company (in terms of salary and benefits).
Think of everything that is legally required for your applicants in order to be part of your company, and any other requirements (e.g., having a car, and/or a driver’s license). Be clear about your salary offer and working hours. You don’t want to waste anyone’s time here by being dodgy, dishonest, or suspicious about your job ad.
In the Dallas area, many cleaning professionals will be native Spanish speakers. Creating an ad that is in both English and Spanish is a good way to connect with them.
You can use an automatic translation service, but they are often inaccurate and can make your ad look unprofessional or not serious. If possible, have someone that is a native speaker translate the ad for you.
Creating a flyer is a good idea because we all know that a captivating image grabs our attention faster than plain written content. However, you will need someone with basic image editing and/or graphic design knowledge to create a customized job ad for your company.
Remember that even before creating the ad, you need to be very clear on what you are looking for. It might take you a few hours and a meeting or two to decide the requirements and benefits that will be included in this job position.
Reviewing the first batch of applicants
Even if you were clear about job requisites, you are still (hopefully) going to get a very large number of applicants, but many of them will not be ideal for your company.
For this step, you will require someone that knows the list of requirements and benefits from A to Z. Besides, they should have a clear understanding of the profile your company is looking for in an employee, both as a professional and as a human being.
House cleaners require a lot of positive personal traits (honesty, good communication with managers, fellow employees and clients, responsibility, and many more).
Keep in mind that, during the entire process, you will need someone capable of answering any questions your applicants might have.
Otherwise, they will either walk out if their questions are not being answered, or they will keep moving forward until they learn a work requirement that they were unaware of previously. This will force them to quit the hiring process, which means that you wasted resources on someone that was not a good candidate in the first place.
Many online services offer an automatic answer to the most common questions (mostly related to payment/work schedule/benefits/requirements).
Contacting and interviewing potential house cleaners
Now that you have a list of potential house cleaners for your company, it’s time to contact them and conduct one or two interviews. At this point, any automated sorting processes will not be effective and you will require human people to select your candidates.
This is because at this point you are trying to learn who they are as a person, their background, and the pros and cons of hiring them. You are probably going to answer many questions from them at the same time, and (hopefully) set the next interview and/or a training day.
Again, many of your applicants in Dallas will most likely be native Spanish speakers, so someone bilingual is a must for this process.
A hiring process is sustainable in the long term if you focus on quality, not quantity. Although understandably, you are trying to hire new workers and grow as a company, especially at the beginning, you need to be patient and not take rushed decisions or bend your own hiring rules too fast.
This next step requires a recruiter that is capable of learning a bit more about each applicant. Good workers do not necessarily mean that they are ideal for your company in the long term.
Besides training, this is probably the most demanding step in terms of resources. You will have to contact each applicant, set a time for an interview, conduct that interview and then discuss the results. You might even have to conduct a second round of interviews.
For this process, you will need someone in your team that is bilingual, has the time and energy to conduct interviews, and is quick on their feet to ask all questions that rule-out any candidates that are not ideal.
Inviting the final candidates for training with a senior cleaner and/or supervisor
This step is similar to the previous one. At this point, you will have ruled out most of your non-ideal applicants.
You will have to schedule a training day (s) with a senior cleaning professional and/or supervisor, that is already working with you, of course.
They will be in charge of assessing and teaching the trainees, which will take some time for them, of course, as they will perform a professional cleaning service, besides the added time for explaining and performing each cleaning task. You will have to pay the trainees for their time, of course.
At this point, it’s helpful to realize how many candidates meet the requisites for your company. Out of dozens and dozens of applicants, perhaps less than 5 end up being hired. And they still have to follow an evaluation period (you should have a three-month evaluation time for new hires).
Think of an estimate of hours it took from yourself, external or internal recruiters from your company, and the cost per hour. This will give you an idea of the cost that it takes you to hire a single cleaner.
David from The Maid Place, a house cleaning service in Frisco, TX and surrounding cities, gave us an interesting approach: they find new applicants by word of mouth, and they do not use external recruiting services. “Our employees were trainees at one point, then they got to being a trainer and found helpers, which then became trainers, and so on.”
What to Look for When Hiring House Cleaners
Knowing exactly what to -and not to- look for when hiring house cleaners is very important. Again, you don’t want to waste your time or your applicants’, and constantly confirm that your applicant fits the position and the requirements that you need.
Depending on the structure of your company, they might need to have their own car or drive someone else’s car, for example.
Even if they fit all the essential requirements, it’s still challenging to find good workers. Here are some tips:
First of all, look for people with plenty of experience in the cleaning & maid industry. This means they are already trained and know how to clean. However, they will need to follow training to ensure they are performing to your company’s standards.
Second, look for individuals that have stayed at the same company for a long time. Look for workers that are stable at their jobs, as this comes with many benefits which we already mentioned.
Third, look for people with good heart. Nothing is more valuable than having good people in your company. They will get along with employees, be respectful to customers, and will create a healthy work environment.
Besides this, remember that you, as a company, also need to offer good qualities.
According to Anthony from Maids 2 Match, a maid and house cleaning service in Dallas, TX, “Always be hiring would be a major key”. He also recommends to “find house cleaners that already have experience so they don’t need any further training”.
What to Avoid When Hiring House Cleaners
There are some red flags that you want to avoid when hiring house cleaners.
As we were discussing earlier, always look for quality before quantity. This is a common mistake among new companies and companies that are thriving and that have too much business. Don’t “settle” for cleaners that do not meet your standards.
Your company will last long if you start growing slowly but with top-quality workers. It takes so much time and energy to build a good reputation, and just one bad experience to tear down all that effort.
Cleaners that have cleaned on their own or for family members are not a good choice. This is because there is a higher chance of them “stealing” your customers, especially after forming a bond with them.
It is common to hear cleaners “suggesting” close family or friends as new hires. Again, bad idea. If there is a problem with one of them (or if things just don’t work out professionally), then the other one is likely to quit as well.
Last but not least, do not hire people that did not last long in their previous jobs. Remember that new hires are a significant cost of resources (training time, money, energy) and if they are likely to quit soon, it’s just not worth it.
What to Offer To New Applicants as A Cleaning Company
So far, we’ve mostly talked about what to look for and the steps to take during the entire recruitment process.
However, it’s just as important to think of what your company has to offer to these potential new members of your team. The recruitment, interview and training process is not only a process to see if your employee is a good fit for your cleaning business, but it is also a way for them to see if you are a good company that they want to work for.
According to HomeMaid Cleaners, some of the most frequent challenges you will face are “finding the right fit” and then “keeping and retaining the talent”. Here are some insights from our fellow companies:
It’s important to be clear about instructions and expectations from them. The owner of DFW Cleaning Co., says she prefers to “over-communicate if they don’t understand” and “be transparent about what they expect”.
No one knows how to fix their mistakes if they don’t even know what they are doing wrong in the first place.
Saul from Family Cleaning Services advises to “have good communication” as well, and “pay them for what they deserve”. From The Maid Place, David recommends this: “pay them fairly throughout the year, provide them with bonuses, give them weekends off. If you pay them better than other companies, they will stay. Simple as that.”
For Ginger from Love My Maids, it’s important to be understanding and patient with your applicants. “Sometimes the best employees do not have great interviews. Don’t judge a book by its cover”.
Last but not least, Anthony from Maids 2 Match suggests having an “online guide for trainers”. This will speed up the process and allow you to train them in a consistent way.
Conclusion
We hope all our fellow cleaning companies in the Dallas/Fort-Worth area enjoy this guide. Not knowing what the best recruitment strategy is can be frustrating and scary, especially if you are just getting started with your cleaning business.
After all you’ve read in this guide, you will have noticed by now that no recruitment strategy is perfect. We have so many different options now for hiring house cleaners, so don’t be afraid to try all of them!
They all have pros and cons. Some of them are free but might represent a pool of candidates that is too wide. You will need a lot of time and energy to filter them out.
On the other hand, you have paid services, whether they are job posting websites or recruitment businesses. They will give you a list of profiles with the exact requirements you are looking for, but they are paid, although the price range is big enough.
Take your time and do your research until you find the method that works best for your company.
Again, we want to thank all our collaborators for this article. It’s really important to support each other and we hope we have the chance to collaborate once again in the future. Thank you so much to DFW Cleaning Co., Family Cleaning Services, HomeMaid Cleaners, Prairie Maids House Cleaning, Love My Maids, The Maid Place, and Maids 2 Match.
Remember you can use the contact form to let us know if this guide helped you get new amazing house cleaners for your company! We always love to hear from both our customers and fellow cleaning services in Dallas.