How to Stay Fully Staffed in Your Cleaning Business

Is your cleaning business in a slump? Are you content with your current income level in your cleaning business or do you feel you could be doing better? Well if you feel like you are in a slump, or feel like you have hit a plateau it may be because you can't seem to stay fully staffed. Heck, maybe even things are going good and you are bringing in customers organically. But if a staff member quits you would be in serious trouble. In this article, we'll cover some effective ways to stay fully staffed and to hire employees for your cleaning business.

Two factors that can generate steady growth in your cleaning business

As you are building your cleaning business there are a few key factors that could limit your growth. One factor is having enough staff on hand to handle expansion. The other is having enough quality leads that convert into customers.

What does having employees have to do with advertising? Well, if you haven't already experienced it, the cleaning industry often has a high turnover rate with employees.

This means one day you could be fully staffed, or even overstaffed, and the next you could be scrambling to find cleaning technicians to do a job. With this in mind, do you have a backup of ready candidates to fill the positions you need?

If you don't, you might want to consider advertising for employees in addition to advertising for cleaning leads. The reason you would want to advertise for employees on a regular basis is that you never really know when you'll need them.

If you don't have a list of potential staff you could recruit you could be left without key people you need to expand. This could cause you to turn down jobs you would otherwise be able to take on.

Create the groundwork for hiring cleaning employees

Now there are a few ways to advertise and promote for employees for your cleaning business. Before you get to that you need to create an enticing job description on your website.

Highlight the benefits of working for you, not just the features. You need to sell potential hires on why they should work for you over some kind of other business. Remember, you're not just competing against other cleaning companies, you are competing against other employers like restaurants and retail establishments.

The next form of promotion you may want to consider is creating a blog post focused on hiring employees and why they should work for you. This blog post can go more in-depth on the details of the ideal employee you are looking for.

A blog post like this can help you attract potential candidates that might be considering a job as a cleaning technician but may be in their research phase. These potential candidates may not have started applying for cleaning jobs but are considering it.

If you catch potential employees in this searching phase, you can then sell them on why they should work for you and this could help convert them into new hires.

You can also talk about the kind of people who would not be a good fit as a cleaning technician. This could help you pre-qualify your potential hires and could help screen out those who are not a good fit.

Advertising for employees with Facebook job postings

There are two main ways of advertising on Facebook to hire employees. One way is to create a job post through a business page. The other is to run ads that send people to your website job description page or application page.

Both options have advantages and disadvantages, but we'll cover more on Facebook job postings first. A Facebook job posting is simply a post you create from your Facebook Business page.

As shown in the photo below in the area where you can create a post you'll click on the job button and then fill out the details on the job from there.

how to create a job post on Facebook page

Once the post is live, it will look similar to the post below and when people apply you will get the application info directly on Facebook.

job posting on Facebook business page

The advantage of these posts is that they are free to create. A big disadvantage of this style of job posting is that you can be greatly limited by the reach of the post. Facebook business pages don't get the kind of organic reach they used to.

These days if you want a lot of exposure from content on your business page you likely need to run paid ads. You can boost these job posts, but running paid ads on Facebook has better options than simply boosting a post.

Advertising for employees with Facebook ads

Another option to find employees on Facebook is by running Facebook ads for employment. These kinds of ads are a bit different because instead of doing a job posting from your business page you can run an ad sending people to your job description page or application page on your website.

There are advantages and disadvantages with this method of advertising as well. One advantage is that you can use some additional methods of targeting.

For example, when you run an ad for employment you choose to advertise within a certain mile radius from your city or business. When you do a job post from your Facebook page anyone that is a fan of your page could see it.

This means that sometimes people outside of the area you want to pull employees from could see your job posting. We have seen this sometimes results in people applying only to find out the job location is too far away for them to commute. By running Facebook ads for employees it can help to reduce or eliminate this problem.

Another benefit is that you can build custom audiences based on visitors to your job description, application, and thank you page after an application is submitted. With these audiences, you can better track conversions and build lookalike audiences to improve your targeting further!

Advertising for employees when you don't "need" to

Let's say you are in a situation where you are adequately staffed and can handle all of your customer needs. Should you advertise for employees at this point? Well, one recommendation would be to advertise for employees, but just not at the same level as you do as when you desperately need employees.

Often there is a lag between when you advertise and when applications come in. Instead of totally stopping your advertising for hiring, consider greatly reducing the ad spend and change the wording to something like "accepting applications" vs "now hiring".

You might reduce your ad spend to something as low as one dollar per day for employment ads. By changing your wording to accepting applications and keeping the advertising budget at a minimum it can still generate interest and you'll have applications on hand if you need a big push for hiring.

Implement hiring policies to acquire the best talent

Part of having enough staff on hand to experience growth in your cleaning business is having the right people on your team. The start of building the right team is having the right hiring policies and practices in place.

The first part of the hiring process you can improve on is with interviewing potential candidates. Often in the interview process potential candidates will reveal that they are not a good fit for your cleaning business.

In order to discover if a potential candidate is a good fit or not, you'll need to ask the right interview questions. Check out this blog post on important questions to ask before hiring a cleaning employee.

Another aspect of hiring is performing background checks on potential hires. Not only will this help you avoid hiring the wrong person, but it can also give your potential cleaning clients peace of mind when they hire your company. People want to hire a cleaning company they can trust, and having a thorough vetting process for potential hires can help build trust.

For more details on hiring the best cleaning employees, check out this webinar on Hiring STAR Cleaning Employees.

Focus on employee training

Once you have made the decision to hire a new employee you need to focus on training them. Unfortunately, a lot of cleaning businesses miss this step or don't take it seriously enough.

A lot of cleaning businesses tend to skip this step because the turnover rate is usually very high in the cleaning industry. Most cleaning business owners think that if people are going to leave quickly anyway, why should you bother spending the resources on proper training.

Well, when you invest back into your staff they can provide better service, which can help you maintain your customer base. Also when your cleaning technicians do a good job, you are more likely to get positive reviews.

Having more positive reviews can help improve conversion rates in your marketing, and build up your positive reputation in the marketplace.

Offer growth opportunities within the company

Another thing you may consider doing is to offer growth opportunities within the company. One reason people stick around long-term with a cleaning company is that they know they have a future there.

By offering appreciation programs, incentive programs, and opportunities for growth within your cleaning business, you are more likely to have a lower turnover rate. In addition to that, you'll also be more likely to attract the right people to your cleaning business.

When you offer internal training, advancement opportunities, and competitive pay, you'll tend to attract more motivated workers. If your employees feel like they are being compensated fairly and can grow with the company, they are less likely to leave for another type of job or move to a competitor's company.

Also if you provide growth opportunities like advancement and bonuses, this could help prevent some of your best cleaners and from staff trying to leave and start their own cleaning businesses.

Conclusion

Keeping your cleaning company fully staffed can depend on three major factors. They are attracting enough applicants on a regular basis, hiring the right people, and keeping your existing staff from leaving.

By keeping a steady supply of ready applicants you can quickly hire the staff you need if you start to grow quickly. One way to do this is by optimizing your employment pages and job descriptions on your website.

After you have optimized your employment-related pages, you are ready to start advertising. There are a couple of ways to do this. One is through job posts and the other is by running paid ads for employees.

Each has advantages and disadvantages, so learn the benefits of both we discussed in this post and implement them to reach your desired hiring goals. With a steady flow of applications coming into your business, next focus on improving your interviewing and hiring process.

Finally, once you start hiring quality employees, you need to implement a training system and opportunities for growth in your company. By doing this you can optimize your cleaning staff's results, and keep them around long-term. Implement these tips to help make your staffing problems a thing of the past!

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