Fifteen minutes, script in hand, every candidate the same questions. You are listening for how they talk about work, not just answers. The bathroom walkthrough is the tell: an experienced cleaner describes an order, top to bottom, dry before wet, and names products by use.
"How long have you been cleaning professionally? Residential or commercial? What do you charge for a two-bed, two-bath? Walk me through how you clean a bathroom, start to finish. If you break something in a client's home, what do you do? If the client says a room isn't right, what do you do? What days and hours do you actually want? Do you have your own supplies and a car? Are you set up as a business, or would you need to be?"
| Candidate | Date called | Bathroom walkthrough: named an order? | Own supplies and car? | Next step |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ☐ | ☐ yes ☐ no | ☐ yes ☐ no | ||
| ☐ | ☐ yes ☐ no | ☐ yes ☐ no | ||
| ☐ | ☐ yes ☐ no | ☐ yes ☐ no |
Never send a new cleaner to a paying customer first. Pay for a test clean at your own home, a relative's, or a friend's, presented as a normal client job. Two hours, thirty to forty dollars in most markets (corpus operators report paying twenty to thirty for a partial test). Inspect it yourself, in person if you can swing it once, otherwise by the same photo checklist your customers' jobs will use.
| What you are testing | Pass looks like | Score 1 to 5 |
|---|---|---|
| Quality | Checklist items done, no missed rooms | |
| Communication speed | Answers fast, no chasing | |
| Photo habit | Photo set complete and on time; matters more than a missed baseboard | |
| Bathroom order | Top to bottom, dry before wet, products named by use | |
| Decision | ☐ keeper ☐ no | |