Your success in maid company hiring is critical to finding and keeping cleaning service clients.

Here’s one of the harsh realities of the maid service industry: turnover can be anywhere between 75% and 400%! There’s no point in downplaying this. You’ll need to address this aspect of your business with eyes wide open to the facts.

You can count on your maid software to boot up when you need it and perform as expected, but when it comes to people, let’s just say there is a considerable amount of unpredictability. So you’re going to need a predictable method for dealing with it.

Many factors contribute to the hiring challenge like pay rate, socioeconomic factors, and the nature of the work. It’s not the kind of job that is high on one’s list for career advancement. COVID has added its level of complexity to the equation for maids who are concerned about entering other’s homes.

Here’s the good news: You can develop skills for finding and hiring the right kind of people. The problem is not insurmountable if you have a plan to deal with the high turnover rate. You just have to make the fluctuation factor part of doing business.

Here are three P’s to consider for doing just that:

Perspective

Every business has it’s own perks and pains, and hiring is probably the single biggest challenge in the maid service business. But it’s also the kind of business that can be set up to run without your daily involvement. Maybe not next week or next month, but with time, this becomes a reasonable, attainable goal.

Many successful maid company owners have achieved this milestone, and start second or even third businesses. We talked about the power of automation in week three and made the point that if you’re too busy running the business, you won’t have time to build a business that will run without you. By setting up solid, documented business processes can free you to pursue other interests.

Setting a goal now to create a business that runs without your constant involvement, can provide a vision that will carry you through the rough spots and make the effort worthwhile.

Plan for the churn

Once you’ve accepted that finding and filtering prospects is part and parcel of your business, you’ll find that the approach similar to the way you do sales and marketing. It’s a numbers game. Once you figure out your hit rate – how many no’s it takes to get to a yes – you can work out a plan to hit your outreach and onboarding targets.

Track and plan your recruitment the same way you do your marketing. Decide on the number of calls and contacts you’ll make daily and weekly. Get clear on the scripts you’ll use and the questions you’ll ask on the front end.

Plan now to make the tough decisions. If a maid has a dental appointment and asks in advance for the time off, be as flexible as possible. But if they miss work and later tell you they had an appointment, it’s an indicator. Decide now to cut your losses and let people go even when it’s inconvenient in the short term.

Plan to recruit constantly. The last thing you can afford is to lose a maid and not have a replacement in the pipeline.

Process = freedom

The better the processes you put in place, the less you will be needed to run the business, and the fewer decisions you will have to make.

Here’s one of the basics when it comes to process-based thinking: The greatest leverage for improvement in a process is at its starting point. Having the ability to look upstream is critical to running your business efficiently.

Let’s take a simple nonbusiness example: Say you want to reduce the time you spend shopping for groceries. One of the best ways is to first create a list of the items you’ll need. Better yet, try to list them in a sequence based on your travel path through the store.

This is the kind of upstream thinking you should use for any repetitive element of your business.

Apply upstream thinking to eliminate candidates as early as possible in the hiring process.

A 5 step process for maid company hiring

Sean Parry runs Neat Services in London. He’s been in business since signing on with Launch27 maid software back in 2014. Part of his approach is to emphasize “Just 1% Recruited” on his company’s website. On this page, he showcases his 5 step process for finding the best maids. It’s a great process and it’s also great marketing. He’s leveraging what’s perceived as a weakness and making it a strength. Brilliant!

His 5 steps also help Sean eliminate prospects early on, but he has additional processes too. For example, his team used to call candidates, which took a huge amount of time. He changed the process and required the candidates to call him. This simple change eliminated half of the candidates. This may seem stringent, but if you cannot depend on them to make a phone call, how can you depend on them to call on your customers?

When you look at Seans’ process for 1% recruitment it might seem excessive, but this kind of rigor has freed him to work on a second business venture. It also allows him to pick up his kids from school each day.

Homework

Here are some questions to answer for yourself this week to help frame your maid company hiring efforts:

First, it’s probably not news to you that maid turnover is high, but what is your perspective about it now? Is it possible you could begin to use this reality to your advantage?

Second, can you carve out some time this week to get away from the busyness and do some planning? What are some creative, inexpensive ways you can begin targeting candidates?

List the steps in your current maid company hiring process, and figure out how you can look upstream for improvements. What are some ways you can head off the less desirable candidates quickly?

Finally, your cleaning business is only as good as the people who do the cleaning. Make sure you recognize those who do it well. There’s no point in creating rigorous hiring systems to get candidates in the door if they’re disappearing just as quickly out the back door. Make it a point to thank your maids for a job well done. Share some of the good ratings they receive. Treat them fairly. It’s not just good business, it’s a good way to live.

Hoveringly,

– Ellie