Secrets for Hiring a Great
Janitorial Service

If you’ve ever hired a janitorial service, you know it’s difficult to find a trustworthy and consistent cleaning company.  When you hire the wrong janitorial service, you waste lots of time, money and resources.  The purpose of this article is to give you 5 secrets to hiring a great janitorial service.

Secret #1:  Find Out How the Janitorial Service Pays Their Cleaning Personnel

Your janitorial service is only as good as the people who clean your building.  As a potential customer, you need to find out whether your janitorial service is motivating their personnel to provide you with great service.

Many janitorial companies hire janitors and simply pay them by the hour.  There are serious problems with this approach.  Hourly workers are not given any incentive to please you or to try to satisfy you long term.  If they perform poorly, their employer will lose your account and they’ll typically get reassigned to another account.  As a result, hourly workers often fail to provide quality service.  You are familiar with these workers.  They are the ones that fail to restock the toilet paper in the ladies restrooms or forget to take out the trash in every office.

The most effective way for a janitorial service to attract and retain good janitors is to provide them with financial incentives to perform better.  Some companies offer “ownership” of janitorial accounts to their cleaning personnel whereby they share in the profit if they retain an account for a certain period of time.  Under this model, cleaning personnel are very interested in keeping you satisfied long term.

Secret #2:       Call References and Ask Probing Questions

Many customers ask janitorial companies to give them references before hiring them.  However, they rarely contact these references.  I strongly suggest that you break this trend and contact references before hiring anyone.  The best way to avoid wasting time hiring and firing poor janitorial companies is to actually call references.  I believe you can learn more talking to a reference for 1 minute than you can learn from talking to the janitorial salesman for 1 hour.

When calling references, it is important to ask probing questions.  Many references are concerned about giving “bad” references and will often try to find something positive to tell you.  You must realize this and ask questions that penetrate “the wall” put up by the reference.  See Secret No. 3 for a couple of examples. 

Secret #3:  Identify Who You Can Call to Solve Your Problems

Unfortunately, problems will arise with the cleaning of your account.  And when they arise, you want to make sure that the person responsible for managing your account is genuinely concerned with providing consistent, quality service.  This person needs to be committed to quickly resolving your problems in a manner that is satisfactory to you.

For this reason, when hiring a janitorial service, you need to ask who you can call to solve problems.  After identifying your primary contact, you want to determine whether this person is reliable and trustworthy.  One good way of making this determination is to ask their references whether they return phone calls in a timely manner or whether they quickly resolve problems.

Secret #4:  Confirm that the Company has Liability Insurance

Ask each janitorial service that you interview if they have general liability insurance.  If they say yes, ask them to send you (directly from the insurance provider) a certificate of general liability insurance so you can verify that the policy is currently in force.  If they say no, then you should consider not hiring this janitorial service. 

The purpose of the liability insurance is to cover any losses that arise from injuries or damages associated with the janitorial company’s cleaning of the building.  For example, if a customer slips and falls on the bathroom floor while the janitor is mopping, the janitorial company’s liability insurance policy should cover the costs associated with the customer’s injuries. 

Secret #5:  Determine Whether the Company Uses Quality Personnel

Again, your janitorial service is only as good as the people who clean your building.  As a potential customer, you need to find out what screening processes the janitorial service uses to find their personnel.  Here are some questions you should ask.  Does the janitorial service generate a lot of applications, or do they use anybody that walks through their front door?  Do they hold screening interviews?  Do they perform background checks?  Do they require their cleaning personnel to pass a cleaning and safety test before cleaning your building?  These are all steps janitorial companies can take to make sure they’re sending quality people into your building.

These 5 secrets will help you hire a janitorial service. Alliance Maintenance has adopted the best practices outlined in this article. We look forward to serving you!

Contact Us or Request a Quote