How are most maid service employees screened?

When looking to hire a cleaning company, you’re right to be concerned about who exactly you’re inviting into your home. Most reputable professional maid services will provide several layers of screening for their employees. We outline a typical screening process below.

Interview process

First up, a prospective cleaner gets interviewed by the professional cleaning company that is looking to hire new employees. This is where a hiring manager usually sits down face-to-face and speaks with a candidate about their experience while reviewing their resume. Having an in-person conversation with the candidate gives the company a fairly good idea about the “people skills” that a candidate has. Do they make steady eye contact or are their eyes always shifting away toward the floor? Do they have a friendly demeanor or can you detect a surly attitude as they slouch away from you in their chair? Being able to read body cues from a candidate provides a level of information beyond just reading what a resume states.

Reference check

If the candidate successfully navigates the interview, the next step is normally to call the references that they included with their resume. Many companies can only legally verify the employment for a prior employee, confirming that a candidate worked at the company between such and such dates. Others—usually smaller, private companies or home-grown businesses—may be open to answering other questions about a candidate’s work, such as:

  1. Why did they leave that job?
  2. How do you know them?
  3. What makes them a good fit for this new job?
  4. If you had the opportunity to rehire this candidate, would you? Why?
  5. Did they get along with their coworkers and management?
  6. Tell me what it’s like to work with them.
  7. What else do I need to know about this person that I didn’t already ask?

By checking references, the cleaning company verifies that the candidate has been truthful on their resume. And in certain cases, they may also learn more about the quality of the work the candidate did, gaining insight into their personality and work ethic.

Background check

If everything looks good with the basic reference check, next up is a criminal background check. Typically, cleaning companies run a multi-year criminal background check that surfaces any criminal offenses—everything from serious crimes resulting in jail time to misdemeanors that resulted in warrants. Some cleaning companies also check a candidate’s driving record or run a credit check.

What about subcontractors vs. employees?

Some cleaning companies hire subcontractors to help handle the ebb and flow of their business. For example, a company may need less help in the summer when families are away on vacation and more likely to miss their regularly scheduled cleanings. Or a cleaning company based in a vacation town may need more people cleaning in the summer months. To manage these spikes in business, companies often hire subcontractors to help out.

When you’re vetting a cleaning company for your home, ask if the cleaning company uses  subcontractors and if they hold those subcontractors to the same selection criteria and background checks to which they hold their employees. Some cleaning companies leave it up to the subcontracting company to do the screening for them, which may bring additional risk. Rest assured that Buckets & Bows Maid Service only uses full-time employees to clean your home. We want to know who exactly is taking care of our customers’ homes and develop a relationship with each employee.

That’s it! We hope you feel much more confident about how the screening process and background check works for a typical cleaning company like Buckets & Bows Maid Service.