Categories
Management

đŸ˜Ĩ Customer Feedback hurting your Cleaning Employees? What to do about it…

This is something we rarely think about once we’re small and have have a handful of clients and cleaners.

When I started my cleaning business 16 years ago we didn’t care much about hurting an employee with customer feedback which can be very offensive at times. I wanted to still provide my employee some feedback, but don’t disclose everything due to getting their feelings hurt. House cleaning is a hard job and the last think we want is discourages employees going into customers’ houses.

I tried speaking to my dispatching software, if there was a way to send filtered feedback to my employees if this feature is something the would build, but they didn’t care about this (they got too many features requests.) This was one of the main problems I’ve noticed with scheduling software that they only care about scheduling/dispatching not employee management.

I put my head to work and told my team to build a solution that would:

  1. Allow me to send feedback easily to my cleaning techs via text message
  2. Allow me to upload photos of the home, otherwise the employee might not remember what house are we talking about.
  3. Will be easy for my office staff to keep updated and always aware of the customer complaints. When there’s too much of automation office staff and sales teams forget and pay attention to spot problems for the management team to solve.

Pipehire’s Complaint Tracker it’s easy to use and implement here’s how to do it.

Step 1: Quick select of the employee and customer: A preloaded list of employees and customers to eliminate data entry.

Step 2: Pick a category of the complaint and zip code: This will allow you to see a future complaints analysis report (coming in 2021) to spot problems in you company and be able to do retraining. Entering zip codes will show you problematic zip codes in your city so you can avoid marketing there.

Step 3: Enter the complaint: Enter here the actual feedback provided by the client.

Step 4: Check a box if the Field Manager checked the job: This is important so you can tell if your field manager is doing his/her job.

Step 5: Did this complaint generated a negative review?: You want to track if this complaints are generating negative reviews on Yelp or Google so you can measure the impact on your business.

Step 6 and 7: Status of employee and customer resolution. A way to have a status of resolution with the customer as well as the cleaner. If you don’t close a complaint properly could bite you in the back as it happened to me in with Flooded house. So make sure you track and close all complaints. A good cleaning service will make sure their clients are truly satisfied not only when things are going well but when there’s issues to solve

Step 8: Only save or Be able to send a text message to the employee quickly.

Only Save: Will only save the entry for the owner or manager of the company. The employee will never be notified about his.

Save and Send SMS to Employee: The entry will be saved in the employee record and the employee also will receive a text message with the following info:

  • Date of compliment
  • Name of the client
  • Reason
  • Description of the compliment

Step 9: Enter a Complaints Score: (1 to 5)

The complaints have a score too, 1 being a Light Complaint, like “they forgot to clean a mirror” and 5 being a Hard Complaint like they almost killed my dog, flooded my house or something extreme. 

We use these scores to feed the Leaderboard which rates your employees from 1 to 5, 5 being the best. 

How to Avoid hurting employee morale.

The little checkbox (see image below): If you uncheck the box, the employee will not see the description or full text of the complaint, we built this because we needed to let the employee know about the compliment/complaint without hurting their feelings. Being able to block the copy of the client if we want to protect the cleaner’s feelings it’s the key to avoid discouraged employees.

Clearly if the employees needs to go for constant performance issues, they will be able to read all their feedback if they want.

Watch the video:

Categories
Webinars

🧠 [Pipehire Webinar] Hiring Cleaners and Virtual Assistants Best Practices and Pitfalls to Avoid with Maria Dorian(Task Away)

Hello everyone, I’ve spoken and worked with Maria Dorian a lot about hiring and managing employees cleaning employees and virtual assistants.

We decided to get together to share our best practices and pitfalls, so you can thrive and finally grow your cleaning business in 2021.

Eight Amazing Topics:

1. Interviewing IS a sales process: Sure we need to qualify them to be sure the candidate has the basics (clean background, car, etc) but then it turns into a sales process where we need to show them why they want to work for us / the company so they can stick around longer reducing employee turnover.

2. Pick the right Candidates: Learn what types of people, personalities make good cleaners. Is it the experienced ones? Those that never cleaned homes? Learn once and for all who to hire.

3. Rewarding employees for referrals: We will cover how to offer properly sign up bonuses for them after training and a sign up bonus for anyone they refer.

4. Advertising channels: Learn how to generate leads from other unusual channels like Youtube, Hotels, local events and even handing out business cards at the grocery story for clerks and other helpful people that you meet that may be looking for a different industry.

5. Trust is everything: Make a candidate feel safe from the moment they go into your website and fill the job form. The more information you could give them about how their first day will go, the better. Trust increases conversions and reduces your hiring costs..

6. Personal relationships: After the candidate’s first day, the person who did the interviewing should call them to see how it went on their first day.

7. Building company culture: Avoid having a revolving door of new applicants, work on company culture. This will set you apart from the competition and will help with trust and personal relationship building.

8. How to properly do exit interviews: Find out why they are leaving and fix what needs fixing in the organization. A $25 Amazon card for their time helps to get honest answers from cleaners leaving the organization. Learn to track the offboarding process of each employee.

Reserve your Spot: http://pipehirehrm-7390520.hs-sites.com/hiring-cleaners-and-virtual-assistants-best-practices-and-pitfalls-to-avoid

Date: 1/28/21 @ 6pm ET

Categories
Product Updates

😛 New Year, New Features coming in 2021

👋 Happy new year everyone! Coming back from a long vacation recharged to continue building the #1 HR software for cleaning services. We got tons of ideas and great feedback for 2021!

We have a clear roadmap with priorities of what to build but…. want to hear from you as we’re making final decisions on new features coming out in 2021. Please click on the link below đŸ‘‡ for the features you’d like to see coming in 2021.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/pipehirehrm/permalink/474241083571400/

Categories
Product Updates

đŸĨŗ Groundbreaking House Cleaning Management Dashboard will be releasing in December 2020

My first 13 yrs of my cleaning business were pretty stressful because I couldn’t retain good employees. I met Debbie Sardone and she help us solved the issues with the Pay by Performance model and much more 😁 Thanks Debbie!

Then another problem popped up? Couldn’t hire people fast enough to keep with the growth of the business, I looked for many hiring solutions for our industry and I couldn’t find anything that will fit our business model.

In 2018 I started developing an internal tool to help us hire faster and better employees. It’s been a success for my own business and it solved the problem! Several months went by and I showed to couple of CBF members and they told me if they could use it for their business and I said why not?

We released Pipehire in 2020 to the public during CBF Dallas during the beginning of pandemic and thank God has been a success! We’re grateful for first people that believed in us Jacquie Shinniman, Jamie Spurrell, Maria Ramirez, Renee Dickinson and Maggie Zwol true early adopters. 🤓

Less Stress, More Life for Cleaning Business Owners.

For 2021 we declared the year of “Less Stress, More Life” in which we focus on building solutions that help you have better quality of life as cleaning business owner. In 2020 we learned the hard way that life is too short. I plan to live my life with less things running in my head, but rather put systems in place to keep that running. My mind is for creativity, dreaming, giving, helping, not for storage, tracking issues or micromanaging staff.

The first steps towards a Less stressful business is here, we call the the Owner’s Dashboard and will have the following features.

Pipehire new Management Dashboard help you see at a glance:

â€ĸ Appointment Calendar: Will allow to see applicants who have confirmed and unconfirmed appointments. This feature will save you time and will give you a real expectation of the your day. Learn more about this.

â€ĸ Coming up Employee birthdays and anniversaries: You will be able to send SMS messages to a particular employee on their birthday or work anniversary. Learn more.

â€ĸ Expiring documents: You don’t want your employees running with a expired document ever!. This feature will show you who has expiring documents. Watch a video.

â€ĸ Remind you of unsolved complaints: There’s some cleaning complaints that are very serious and that will need to be reminded of and properly closed (this feature was inspired by this real life case The Flooded house complaint). You can also setup the reminder here and also how often. You can tell the system to skip the weekends so you are not bothered. Learn more about complaints.

â€ĸ New Applicants with Score: When you need employees fast you want to be alerted of. This section will show you newest applicants and their employee score.

Why we build this? We want to help our users become proactive and efficient and spend less time worrying about their cleaning business operations and live with less stress.

When this feature will be released to the public? December 2020.

Check this video explaining how this new Dashboard will look like:

Questions or Feedback?

Email us at support@pipehirehrm.com or visit us at Pipehire to learn how to manage better all you cleaning employees.

Categories
Webinars

🧠 Hiring Trends and Strategies to Thrive in 2021 featuring Amar Ghose from Zenmaid.

One of my goals for 2021 is to spend less time running my cleaning business and more focused on personal and family goals. I think you will agree with me, life is too short as we learned the hard way during 2020.

This December 15th I will be hosting Amar Ghose in my last webinar of the year to discuss what’s coming in the Hiring and Recruiting space for the residential cleaning market in 2021. 

And also we want to give you a clear Hiring Strategy Step by Step so can thrive in 2021 and get the best cleaning talent working for you, so you can focus on other things!

You’ll learn, how to:

1. Build a go to strategy to hire more and better employees.

2. Create your hiring personas to bring the right people from the get go.

3. Hiring trends (and predictions) for the cleaning industry in 2021. 

4. Amar Ghose’s hiring book discussion5. Q&A’s and more.

Topic: Hiring Trends and Strategies 12/15/20 – Amar Ghose and Juan Chaparro.

Download Webinar PDF

Hiring Trends and Strategies to Thrive in 2021Download

Visit The Perfect Hiring Ad for Maid Services mentioned by Amar in the Video.

Categories
Hiring

đŸŽ¯ Cleaning Business Guide: 7 Hiring Trends and Strategies to Thrive in 2021

We’re all looking forward to 2021 in every area of our lives. We’re exhausted by all the news, viruses and political races that 2020 brought.

What’s happening in the world of recruitment in 2021? and how does your cleaning business can prepare and take advantage of coming up trends in Cleaning HR?. Let’s take a look of what I see coming and what will be important to thrive, not survive in 2021.

1. A more Diverse Workforce

Diversifying you cleaning workforce has become more crucial than ever. I have heard from other successful cleaning business owners like Mark Baker from Motivated Maids how he is including everyone in the workforce, finding talent where he would normally wouldn’t look it and growing his Canadian cleaning service to be one of the largest in the country.

Applicants to cleaning technicians jobs agree that they tend to prefer to apply to companies where Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is in place. So try hiring people you would normally hire, use a system to let the system do the sorting and not you. I see this error happening again and again, where the owner is the bottle neck of growth by not putting a system or process in place, so the office staff can do the hiring.

2. Better company-employee relationship.

Most job seekers are looking for employers who can handle a Covid-19 related life changes with more compassion and flexibility. Therefore, your recruitment strategy for 2021 should include focus on building and enhancing the company-employee relationship. Building this relationship with your employees is always a win-win.

One of the best ways to attract the top tier cleaning talent that I learned, is being intentional in making it a better place for work. I see this with my own employees that every so often bring me their friends and family members interested in applying to work with us. This saves time and resources of having to start from scratch when you need to hire a new cleaner.

3. Company Culture and Branding

Make 2021 the year to finally implement that dreamed company culture you had in mind.

I define company culture as the personality of to your company with your workforce and clients.

This starts from the moment they visit your website and apply for a job until, they meet your for a in person or zoom interview. All the touch points matter.

– Juan Chaparro


One of my favorite company cultures I see today is Trader Joe’s. I love their funny signs, colorful walls, quirky Hawaiian shirts đŸŒē and unique way of doing things, but more importantly is their people, if you approach any of them, they have this cool vibe and real knowledge about their location. I think as cleaning business owners, can create great company culture within our companies, we might not have all the cool things that a brand like Trader Joe’s does but we have the PEOPLE, the most important asset in our businesses.

4. Use of Applicant Tracking Systems for Hiring

As technology keeps evolving with mobile and browser technologies it’s very important that your office implements an applicant tracking system for your cleaning business. Business owners don’t have time to sort manually anymore looking for the right candidate or if they meet requirements or can work legally in the U.S.

At Pipehire we have implemented a hiring funnel and scoring system for cleaning employees which takes the guesswork out of the job. Within our funnel you can see their Recruitment Score, this help you quickly determine the person for the position and to move forward with an interview, vs looking at hundred’s of resumes and trying to make a decision who moves into the next stage.

5. Full Online Identity lookup to make better hiring decisions

If you were to look into your applicants social media accounts, you wouldn’t hire many of them right?. In 2021 employee social media monitoring will take more importance to understand our workforce and make better decisions for our cleaning business.

Also continuous MVR monitoring of current employees and new candidates will become more important as technology and motor vehicle department make the data more accessible. This monitoring will reveal if they have been convicted of driving under the influence, traffic violations, or even unpaid parking tickets while working with you and entering your client’s homes.

⚠ī¸ We tend to forget to monitor our current workforce where there’s a higher risk of failure than a new candidate that has not even started.

– Juan Chaparro

6. Remote office workers vs in-house.

As more industries and jobs transition into remote work, cleaning businesses are no exception. More cleaning business owners have opted out for working from home without any issues during 2020.

I’ve been doing it for 10 yrs with 6 people spread across several continents and I love it! Most office location issues are solved with a coworking space a virtual mail address and a regular 5×10 storage for cleaning supplies and distribution. I have even coached couple of owners into hiring their own virtual assistants and they are finding success in their journey using the lean maid business model. Tracking remote workers time isn’t rocket science, many cleaning businesses use Hubstaff to see what their teams are working on and track their time.

I believe most cleaning businesses can transition to full remote office if they are ok with not micromanaging their staff. 😀

7. Onboarding Process and Candidate Experience

Customer experience is key for our business, but don’t forget Candidate experience. Why? Because they are like clients, looking to buy into a job promise and put their trust and effort to get a paycheck and be able to provide for their family and reach their dreams. I see this process very fragmented and poorly designed for most of the industry. I’m constantly looking at cleaning businesses websites and find out their careers / jobs page is the last thing on their mind, it’s outdated and sometimes ask people to fax or email resumes.

I’ve learned that my business brand and experience will attract or deter the BEST candidates. I’m not looking for any candidate, I’m looking for the BEST because they want to work for the best cleaning company they can find locally. I have found this to be so true and so overlooked. Paying attention to this brings me better cleaning tech leads thus making the hiring process easier and getting better results overall. Now add to the best candidates a scoring system and funnel and you have well oiled machine to hire and recruit A players.

Don’t underestimate your careers page, your job form and how they get handled afterwards. This interactions will bring better and more stable cleaning techs as you keep growing your business.

Make 2021 your best year ever, thrive don’t survive. đŸ’Ē

Categories
Hiring

👀 How to identify A, B, C players during the interview process?

Finding the A-Players for you cleaning business doesn’t have to be hard. Here’s so traits we look for:

  • They’re looking for the best job opportunity
  • They call and apply within the same day, call them back asap
  • They fill all the questions to application
  • Prior jobs experience is fully completed
  • You can call those past managers
  • They show up on time to the interviews on time
  • They have a strong word and are committed
  • Their NO is NO and their YES is a YES
  • They show integrity
  • And they ask questions about the company and what’s in it for them

Simple right? Yes now go and get them!

Questions on managing cleaning employees?

Email us at support@pipehirehrm.com or visit us at Pipehire to learn how to manage better all you cleaning employees.

Categories
Product Updates

👋 Indeed/Facebook integration coming soon – In the meantime, there’s this solution.

Based on our users’ feedback, we decided to start working on an integration with Indeed and Facebook. Posting your job offers will become a breeze with a click of a button!

In the meantime, we can help you post your job offers inside your accounts manually with our Support team.

Need help with this? Set up a support call or call 415-223-0371 our Customer Success Manager is ready to help you.

Categories
Product Updates

đŸ”Ĩ New Management Dashboard coming (and the $5000 flooded house story) that helped us create it.

Pipehire is working on a new Management Dashboard to help you see at a glance:

  • New applicants
  • Coming up birthdays/anniversaries
  • Expiring docs
  • Remind you of unsolved complaints like the flooded house.
  • and much more.

In there you can take action on important and critical action items. We want to help our users become proactive and efficient and spend less time worrying about their business operations.

Categories
Culture

👋 Hello! We’re Pipehire and this is how we got started.

Back in 2002, Karen and I were selling door to door cookware in hot and humid Houston, TX trying to get ahead in life as young 18 and 21 yr old couple.

In the afternoons we used to go to the big box retailers looking to meet people to eventually visit and demo our cookware. One night during our regular visits to these retailers we met a lady that introduced us to a multilevel business. We got started in it and did our very best for 4 years, but with zero results. ☚ī¸

One of the members in this group saw us in such bad financial shape that brought us to clean homes with them to learn the basics so we could clean for others. Soon after we started working for a home cleaning service as employees. Few months after, due to bad management, and how they treated us we decided to start a cleaning company of our own. That’s how Gmaids got started and the firestarter to Pipehire.

Pipehire was created of one simple need in our cleaning company:

Hire faster and better cleaning employees without sifting through a lot applications or wasting valuable time.

We tried many applicant tracking softwares / apps for small businesses and task management tools to avoid things falling through the cracks, our main issues were:

  • Evaluating and hiring good candidates.
  • Remembering work anniversaries, birthdays.
  • Tracking customer feedback, attendance, expired car insurances you name it, plus the all the many things to remember when you have cleaning employees.

We found a problem 🤔

No software or tool was designed for the residential cleaning industry nor the cleaning business owner in mind, that could help in the process of making hiring and management easier. In 2017 I started to draw a concept of a funnel type website that could give me a score to my job applicants. I told l Luis my brother to help us find a web developer to help us do it for our own cleaning business.

How Ruben got involved 🚴

Luis was into cycling and he remembered that Ruben an old friend in this cycling group had quit from United Nations as Senior Developer. He reached out to him and soon after started working on improving Gmaids backend software and then learning about the challenge of hiring cleaning employees. After few months of coding we came up with a scoring system for recruiting employees based on their answers which will and make hiring and recruiting easier.

We got a solution! 🚀

So after building and making hiring easier for Gmaids, Pipehire was launched to the public in March 2020 as a stand alone HR and management software for cleaning services. We’re focused on building software tools for growing residential cleaning services across the US and the world.

Best,

Juan, Luis and Ruben

Feel free to contact us with any questions! support@pipehirehrm.com