How To Find Commercial Cleaning Employees

Where Cleaning Services Can Find Employees

This is a great little tutorial on how to find commercial cleaning and janitorial employees. Nowadays the number one issue effecting cleaning services is find quality cleaning staff. We are not these huge fortune 500 companies with endless budgets and the cleaning industry in general is not the most glamorous profession.

Today we talk about how to become more organized and put together a recruiting plan. The goal is to build out long term, sustainable ways to find more employees. Whether we need 1 or 50, chances are we will need to find staff long term.

The real key here is creating a plan we can track and keep to month after month.

Paid advertising
Agencies
Colleges/Schools
Job Fairs
Affinity Groups
Client Referrals
Employee Referrals

Paid Advertising

We are going to start with paid advertising. The first question most cleaners will have is where should we go for paid advertising? My starting point would be google and pretend you are looking for a job. What are the most popular job sites that come up.

Google job opening your city. In the video we used Rochester as an example, in this search you can see the first search page is mostly big national job sites to explore. Some of them are: indeed, monster, yahoo hot jobs, zip recruiter and several others.

A good idea is to continue to the 2^nd page of search to see the more local results, this is where the less expensive and niche type places will be. In this example you can see a couple local job sites, 2 colleges (remember people go to college to 30 years old nowadays and even well into their 40’s for some professions, its not just young kids).

Local online newspaper can be a great one, they have some of the most traffic locally already. Also, many will team up with a national source like monster so you can get a 2 for 1 deal. I know couple years ago here the online newspaper had a deal to buy an employment ad from them and you would get the same ad with yahoo too.

Employment Staffing Agencies

Agencies can come in several different categories, the main ones are: temporary employment staffing, Permanent recruiting where they find you a technician, cleaner but you hire them directly and also permanent staff that you manage but they still technically work for the staffing agency and they cover all the payroll taxes and insurance.

The last one is using an agency just to interview, sort people out.

Colleges/Schools

Colleges can have a very diverse group of people nowadays in terms of ages, skill level and number of hours they are looking to work. For part time office staff this is one of the best places to look. Also part time night cleaners, most student activities are during the day and some may want to have a small job at night or weekends.

Main tactics can be online forums, bulletin boards, physical job placement centers, internships, job listing sites and student newsletters.

The really large universities might even have a formal paid advertising system all set up. These are all really great guerilla recruiting schemes that are inexpensive.

Job Fairs

Job fairs come in a couple different forms, sometimes they are paid events held several times of year. Governments, community centers and even schools can also hold them. This can be a great way to qualify candidates very quickly and get a stack of resumes to follow up on in the future.

Simplest way to look is google it for your specific area.

Churches| Associations |Community Centers

This is mostly a low cost, guerilla recruiting tactic, although some may charge a tiny fee or have sponsorships on their website or email newsletters.

Couple different ways to approach this one. Going door to door for example and visiting all the churches in your area and asking if they know a member that is looking for a different job. Most will have some kind of newsletter, bulletin board, etc physically in the building that maybe you can pin up.

If you have the budget, you could also just mail every church a flyer 2x year and email 2x.

Affinity Groups

This is a broad topic but nowadays people spend a lot of time in groups of people with like interests or backgrounds. Thinking the other way by thinking of a demographic and then where do they hang out?

For example 25-45 men is very heavy into sports talk, now this is mostly done with sports talk on twitter, text, email. Every sports talk radio station nowadays is mostly digital and sells various digital programs.

*** Note this is just an example and can apply to military families, first responders, women groups and everything else you could possibly think of.

Client Referrals

Client referrals will be far more popular with residential cleaners just because of the sheer volume of clients most have. A lot of cleaning services have both commercial divisions and residential divisions so I thought it was a good idea to point it out.

A couple simple ways you can reach out is social media, quarterly email blast and even mailing out a letter or postcard with a $100 to $200 bonus (whatever its worth to your business.

Employee Referrals

This is how most commercial cleaning and janitorial services really grow. Something so simple like this tactic is just coming up with an amount of money worth it to your company for that position, $100 at least. Then reminding your current employees, their family, friends they can make an easy $100 or more buy referring someone.

The key here is just reminding people on some rotation, quarterly for example.