Heromaid is a residential cleaning service based in downtown San Jose that started with the core mission of providing our local communities with help and relief through our efforts as professional house cleaners. We understand that saving people from having to clean their homes means saving them time to do what they genuinely love. But we also named our company in aspiration of becoming our community’s real, local Hero. One of our first orders of business was to partner up with Cleaning for a Reason. Heromaid has offered free house cleaning services for women undergoing cancer treatment since the very start. We are proud of our staff’s commitment and loyal customers in helping us further our reach. We believe caring for our employees and treating them like superheroes translates into an above-and-beyond experience for our clients.
HOW WE BUILD AWESOME HOUSE CLEANING TEAMS
Step 1: Find the best house cleaning professionals
Each candidate is run through the most thorough hiring process in the industry. Many of our large commercial clients require diligent background checks, insurance, and trustworthy credentials for each team. Why shouldn’t you? We spent many weeks trying to find the best match for our organization and customers. Since we don’t believe in unhappy Heroes and a high turnover rate, to be considered for a spot on the team, a Hero candidate must:
-Undergo a thorough multi-state background check
– Have at least three years of industry experience,
– Speak fluent English,
– Have references that reflect a history of the stellar quality of service,
– attention to detail and customer satisfaction,
– Be creative and display a high taste in arrangements and personal touches.
Step 2: Don’t contract house cleaners. Hire them.
It is much easier to run an online platform than running a high-tech house cleaning company since you are never directly involved with or responsible for your customer’s complete satisfaction. This is a very deliberate decision on our part, and our model is unique in that we offer all the ease of a simplified, high-tech website and none of the contracts and cost-cutting approaches of nationwide maid companies. This ensures we have an unshakable consistent team that we trust! Further, it allows us to tune the quality of our work to your standards finely. The IRS has a very defined set of factors to determine whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor. We feel these factors also highlight what we would never compromise on:
An Employee: Extensively trained by the company – This is crucial to us! We are the first in the industry to TRAIN our employees for eight weeks and only hire candidates with a future as team leaders. Contractor agencies, by law, cannot train their contractors. The most they will do is a simple screening before sending contractors into your home.
Our house cleaners don’t simply undergo a background check and receive a checklist. They undergo a multi-level training process and are tested for perfect cleaning before being sent to clean a home. We administer 3, 6, 9, and 12-month performance and customer satisfaction reviews and promote and reward the best performers.
The training never ends. The products we use, materials science, surfaces in your home, efficient cleaning techniques, safety, and last but certainly not least, SERVICE are all covered continuously. Full-time Employment We only employ full-time employees, which is essential to quality service for many reasons!
- Reliability – With no control on contractor’s schedules, their availability can be sporadic especially considering that they work with multiple agencies part-time; this results in many cancellations and interruptions in your scheduled cleanings and makes them highly unreliable.
- Consistency- Our employees are committed to our company and no one else. This means they are committed to you and no one else. This allows for a highly consistent level of service and you’ll more than likely always receive the same team (that know your home inside and out)! Full-time employees who are compensated well and are given a clear career path are more likely to stay with an employer long term. Our professional house cleaners have the lowest turnover rate in the Bay Area!
- Loyalty – Well-compensated employees who are on a clear career path and receive perks (weekly massages!) tend to be rock-solid in loyalty. They pour their heart and soul in customer satisfaction and their work because a happy customer means promotions and greater opportunities for them.
- Quality – With a packed schedule, constant practice, and constant performance reviews, a full time employee performs the same work repeatedly. This helps them develop a highly efficient pattern and an amazing eye for detail that contractors can’t hope to achieve.
- Speed – Cleaning is hard work! In this business, part-time employees and contractors have trouble keeping up and tend to get less done on jobs as compared to full time house cleaners who have conditioned themselves to easily handle the workload.
Is provided tools/cleaning supplies Through extensive research and experimentation, we have assembled an incredibly efficient and powerful array of proper supplies and tools that is kept as environmentally friendly and non-toxic as possible. A house cleaner can only clean as well as their equipment allows them to and we never leave our pros with nothing but the best. We keep tight inventory protocols and ensure your team arrives fully stocked with backup vacuums and supplies. What they won’t do is arrive with heavily-used odorous rags and dollar-store cleaning supplies as most cost-cutting contractors will opt for.
Our constant performance reviews and promotions ensures that all our teams are seasoned veterans that made the cut and are compensated well for their expertise. Once in a while, we encounter an under-performing cleaner and we can easily rectify the situation with more training, discipline, and even terminate the employee if customer satisfaction has been breached. Our employees have a vested interest in a healthy relationship with you as they expect a long-term arrangement and want to keep you as satisfied as possible. Having employees rather than contractors allows us to develop incredibly talented teams. Step 3: Train them.
- Week 1: Materials and Green Clean Science:
Every surface material is different and there is no one magic green cleaning product to clean them all. Every surface type needs different Ph-balances, precautions, and procedures to produce the best clean without damaging the surface.Using an acidic vingar-based cleaner on marble, for example, can quickly wear down the highly polished finish and destroy the beautiful, deep sheen natural marble produces in no time. We train our Heroes to only use a Ph-balanced green cleaning product on marble to maintain an impeccable shine and never deteriorate the finish.We feature a blog with cleaning tips for expensive and difficult surfaces as well as many other topics. Head on over and check it out!
- Week 2: Equipment and Procedures
A Hero clean needs some serious firepower. We have some seriously advanced equipment like battery-powered commercial backpack vacuum cleaners equipped with HEPA filters. That’s right. HEPA vacuums systems are the same ones they use to keep hospital surgery rooms and high-end server farms 99.6% dust and allergen free. Such industries have no tolerance for allergens, dust, and other irritants that can harm to humans, furniture, and equipment.And neither do we.But cutting edge vacuums take special training to use at their maximum effectiveness and efficiency. We use number-coded microfiber cleaning cloths to ensure your surfaces never get wiped down with a dirty layer (and to cut down on water waste washing multiple towels). We only polish sensitive surfaces like mahogany and brass with clean, ultra soft towels that don’t leave dust behind.Procedures cover minute details such as cleaning a monitor’s sceen without causing warping or scratches. We make sure to always wipe down dust first before cleaning to prevent scouring your expensive surfaces.We share a ton of tips like this on our blog and are constantly researching best practices. Come check it out!
- Week 3: Efficiency and Best Practices
Some parts of the home are far more difficult to clean than others. To keep our services affordable and maintain premium quality, we train our Heroes on how to most effectively clean time-consuming tasks like window blinds, fogged glass, tile grout, soup scum, and stains using our own time-layering approach.This allows our Heroes to do a quick scan of the home and note what needs more time soaking and loosening of dirt so that they can more efficiently multi-task and gently clean surfaces in more than one pass to produce an incredible clean without use of excessive force.Once the surface is clean, the Heroes are trained on how to best maintain the clean so it will last until the next cleaning so your home will stay fresh and beautiful for as long as possible!We detail some of these time-layering techniques on our tips blog.
- Week 4-5: Finishing Touches
What separates a good cleaning from an amazing one are the details and the little touches. The last folded towel will be folded into an intricate turtle design, your bed sheets tucked perfect, your shirts folded design-out to allow for easy selection, and hundreds of tiny little details you’ll only notice days after we’re gone.This takes finesse and practice practice practice. We don’t skimp on details because what kind of Heroes would we be if we did?
- Week 6-8: Supervision and Final Test
This is when on-the-job training is really ramped up and the pressure is on. Our Heroes perform to their absolute peak under the careful supervision of one of our Captains (Heroes with years of experience under their belt). At the end of two weeks of supervised training, we put our Heroes through a grueling practical final exam covering every aspect of training. No mistakes, no detail missed. They will repeat training weak points until the exam is passed.Once through, we upgrade the Candidate to Seasoned Hero and you can be assured you will receive nothing but the absolute best in service from any of our team members.