{"id":17456,"date":"2026-06-25T13:25:05","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T13:25:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/?p=17456"},"modified":"2026-06-25T13:26:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T13:26:16","slug":"why-57-percent-of-my-interview-confirmations-never-showed-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/why-57-percent-of-my-interview-confirmations-never-showed-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Why 57% of My Interview Confirmations Never Showed Up"},"content":{"rendered":"    <div class=\"zm-post-first-section mb-24\">\n        <div class=\"first-section-img-wrapper\">\n            <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-content\/themes\/zm-theme\/assets\/images\/first-section-img.png\" alt=\"first-section-img\" width=\"40px\">\n        <\/div>\n        <h3 class=\"zm-post-first-section-title mb-10 w-80 w-md-100\">Brought to you by expert maid service owners<\/h3>\n        <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text-wrapper fs-16 mb-10\">\n            <div>\n                <i class=\"ph-bold ph-check text-primary\"><\/i>\n            <\/div>\n            <div>\n                <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text\">\n                    <strong>\n                        Tips and advice shared here, have helped us grow our own maid services.\n                    <\/strong>\n                    With eight current and former cleaning business owners in our team, including our CEO and founder Amar, we know the maid service industry inside and out.\n                <\/div>\n            <\/div>\n        <\/div>\n        <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text-wrapper fs-16 mb-10\">\n            <div>\n                <i class=\"ph-bold ph-check text-primary\"><\/i>\n            <\/div>\n            <div>\n                <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text\">\n                    <strong>\n                        We partner with amazing leaders in the cleaning industry like Debbie Sardone,\n                    <\/strong>\n                    Angela Brown, Courtney Wisely and Chris Scwap and more, to provide you with the latest industry insights.\n                <\/div>\n            <\/div>\n        <\/div>\n        <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text-wrapper fs-16 mb-10\">\n            <div>\n                <i class=\"ph-bold ph-check text-primary\"><\/i>\n            <\/div>\n            <div>\n                <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text\">\n                    <strong>\n                        We\u2019ve built the easiest-to-use scheduling software, built specifically for maid service owners!\n                    <\/strong>\n                    <a class=\"text-primary2 text-decoration-underline\" href=\"https:\/\/zenmaid.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Check out ZenMaid<\/a>\n                <\/div>\n            <\/div>\n        <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n    \n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Listen on: <a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/151-why-57-of-my-interview-confirmations-never-showed-up\/id1791590022?i=1000774176507\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/6TtudGdZoWDgZ0vIUczx3R?si=85cec4c8c25c4a89\">Spotify<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=gzYlcivQulI\">YouTube<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: #151: Why 57% of My Interview Confirmations Never Showed Up\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"152\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/episode\/6TtudGdZoWDgZ0vIUczx3R?si=85cec4c8c25c4a89&amp;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-1\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Introduction<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean. And in today&#8217;s episode, I want to share the numbers behind our hiring and ad spend for the month of May. I know it&#8217;s the end of June now, but I have been able to look over the numbers. I&#8217;ve also been able to see where we&#8217;re going in June for spend. And at many requests, it has been on like how much to spend on hiring ads, that type of thing. So I thought it would be a great episode to go into all of this for you guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And if you are a long time listener of me, or just been exposed to my ideas, you will have known that I have historically not spent any money on job listings whatsoever. And I&#8217;m talking for years. We did not spend on Indeed at all. And what I used to do that no longer works \u2014 because of Indeed&#8217;s mechanisms and them kind of trying to milk every penny, of course, out of us that they can \u2014 is I would make a listing on Indeed, not sponsor it, pause that same listing, make a copy of it, and then just do that every single week so that we would get pushed to the top of the results, the results that were not sponsored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You can&#8217;t do that really anymore. You can also not, because you&#8217;re not allowed to make copies of jobs that look too similar. And additionally, you cannot have more than one listing going now without paying for anything. So Indeed has just made it harder and harder for us to do anything for free. And this is very unfortunate. It is also unfortunate that Facebook Jobs got taken away from us a couple of years ago. So things are just becoming much harder to have your job listings out there for free and actually get the type of volume that we need as growing cleaning businesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And even if you are not growing, but just dealing with typical turnover \u2014 and every single one of our businesses, we&#8217;re going to be experiencing turnover. Just to keep up with turnover alone, you&#8217;re going to have to be still having applicants. You&#8217;re still gonna have to be doing interviews, even if you are not actively meeting somebody right now. And you all know that a huge recommendation of me is to always have job listings going and always be interviewing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-2\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Group Interviews and Going All-Zoom<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Now, I&#8217;m going to mention, if you have never heard of me or heard of my content, definitely go check out the episode on group interviews. This is still our tried and true method \u2014 we are doing group interviews every single week. And now we are doing them multiple times a week because my HR manager, Crystal, has the bandwidth to do so. It also allows us to be a bit more flexible on people&#8217;s schedules, as opposed to just offering once a week. So she is offering multiple times a week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I also wanted to mention, I don&#8217;t know if in that group interview episode I really highlighted that all of our interview process now is on Zoom. There is absolutely zero in-person interviewing happening. And this is just a convenience sake. It is also as our service area has increased, we have wanted to make it more convenient for people to show up to the interview and make it easier. Because if they already have a job, say they&#8217;re looking to change career paths, it is very difficult to ask somebody to drive, you know, 45 minutes one way for an interview. And so anything that we can do to make it easier for people, especially on that initial group interview, we&#8217;re going to do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I just wanted to mention, in case you are still trying to do everything in person, I highly recommend trying out the online interviewing process through just a Zoom interview. And even our secondary interviews are also all on Zoom. So both the first round of group interviews and then the secondary individual interviews that we have been doing, those have all been on Zoom as well. I wanted to go into detail about that a bit more because it&#8217;s working very well. I do not think we will ever go back to in-person interviewing, frankly, because of the convenience, the show rate, that type of thing. It&#8217;s much harder to get people to show up to an in-person one. Not saying that that&#8217;s a bad thing, but we do want to make it as convenient as possible, especially for those people who have busy lives. Those can make excellent, excellent staff members, but if we are making it hard for them to fit the interviews in in their life, it&#8217;s just going to be tough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I am not going to ever tell you guys, though, to go to completely individual interviews from day one. I think you&#8217;re going to waste so much time. I still feel very, very strongly about that. If you can offer a couple of times during the week for your open group interviews, I think that is advantageous, but I really want you guys to avoid setting up individual interviews as the first round, because you&#8217;re going to just waste so much time. And I will talk about that in the no-show data that I have for you guys today, because even with setting up on Zoom, the no-show rate for May&#8217;s numbers was still over half.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-3\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The May Hiring Funnel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;So let&#8217;s get into the numbers. This is our hiring funnel data for the month of May, 2026. Indeed shows you how many people started applications, how many people actually submitted applications. We have then how many people confirmed that they were going to show up to the interview, how many no-showed, how many actually attended, how many received the job offer, and how many are actually active or started in the month of May. And of course, we have more people that started in June, and I will get into how much we have ramped down our spending, how much we spent in May during our high turnover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So if you guys have been listening, you know that we had some pretty significant turnover from April to May, and that has died down, and we do have it under control now. We are sitting at a very good place for staffing. And so we have thus ramped down our spending on Indeed, but we are still spending and will continue to do so just indefinitely in order to keep applicants coming in and for our listings to be seen. So that&#8217;s kind of going to be the mechanism we pull \u2014 how much money we spend, how many listings we put out there \u2014 but we currently have two, and we will continue to have two listings based on commercial, residential, as well as our locations that we service, just to get more eyes on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So all of that being said, in May, 395 people started applications on Indeed. 343 of them submitted applications. So 87% of the people who started an application submitted it. 82% of the people who started confirmed the group interview, meaning that we invited them, they said yes, we will show up. So 82 people out of 395 that started applications \u2014 but let&#8217;s say out of 343 that actually submitted, 82 no-showed the Zoom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How many of you guys think didn&#8217;t show up? How many people do you think did not show up to the actual Zoom? If you guessed 47, you would be correct. That is right. 57% of the people who said they were going to show up to a Zoom interview did not show up. Over half, okay? And if this does not sell you guys why you should be doing group interviews, I don&#8217;t know what else will, because over half of the people who said, yes, I will be there, did not show up in front of their computer for a job they said they wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So this is why we do group interviews. We do not want to waste our time on the 47 time slots that would have had to happen if we did individual interviews. Could you imagine? That would literally be all of Crystal&#8217;s entire job. That&#8217;s her entire week \u2014 setting up interviews and having people not show up. And obviously, whatever, they don&#8217;t show up, you can still just do your work, but that is administrative labor. That is mental labor. There&#8217;s just so much that goes into setting all of that up just for 57% of them not to show up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I just want to highlight this for you guys. If you have not implemented group interviews, I highly recommend it. I don&#8217;t want you guys to be wasting your time on things, right? You&#8217;re already so busy. You might be cleaning right now. You might be driving to a job right this very minute &#8217;cause somebody called out. Leave it in the comments when you can safely do so if that is who you are right now. So you don&#8217;t have time for 57% of people to not show up for their interview, right? You don&#8217;t have time for that. And that just simply is what it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-4\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why I Won&#8217;t Remind Candidates About Interviews<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;And I&#8217;m not saying \u2014 obviously in an ideal world, I would want that to change. I would want more people to show up. However, I will say, I have had guests, I&#8217;ve had conversations before where people are like, we call them and confirm that they can make it to that interview, right? I am not going to start doing that. Because the way I see it is, if we confirm over online \u2014 overline, I&#8217;m going to say that, that&#8217;s a new phrase. If we confirm virtually that you are going to be there at 1 p.m. on Tuesday the 25th or whatever it is, if you say that, I do not feel that I should then call them and remind them of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because to me, if they can&#8217;t manage to show up on a Zoom interview and manage themselves in that way, I don&#8217;t want to artificially remind them and give them the tools to succeed for the initial interview. Because the way I see it, that means that they need coddling, right? I want to see, can they manage themselves? This is the first layer. 57% of the people who no-showed, that cuts everybody out. Obviously, we need volume of applicants in order to get more diamonds in the rough. But I don&#8217;t want to accidentally hire a piece of coal because I helped them become a diamond in the beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Obviously, if we hire somebody and they need training, like of course they need training. But I need to see that they can at least manage themselves to open their computer. They don&#8217;t even have to put pants on. They might be pantsless, guys. I don&#8217;t know, it&#8217;s a computer screen, right? Maybe I don&#8217;t have pants on \u2014 I do, spoiler alert. But point being, if they can&#8217;t even manage themselves in that way, they are not going to be a good staff member. They might be a great cleaner, but they&#8217;re not going to be a responsible staff member. I need somebody who can manage themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I would say, you can do whatever you want, of course. But I will say that I will not be adding any extra layer of helping them remember. They have the confirmation. What else do they need from me? They shouldn&#8217;t need that, because I know for all of us, when we make an appointment, we show up because we&#8217;re able to manage ourselves in that way \u2014 for the most part, of course. And so that is a filtering process. I am happy with that. I&#8217;m happy that those people saw themselves out before we even had a conversation with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-5\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">From Applications to Retained Hires<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;So 57% of confirmed did not show up. That means 10% of submitted applications actually attended the group interview. So that&#8217;s 35 people. Of the 35, we offered 10 of them job offers. So 2.9% of the submitted applications turned into actual offers. And the confirmed active\/starting \u2014 meaning they said yes, and they started, and so far have not been lost \u2014 was six. So 1.7% of the applications that were submitted in May actually became staff members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So we had to hire a lot. We typically don&#8217;t have to hire that much in a month, but we did have that turnover. Like I said, we had some people leave. We had some people that had started previously that did not work out, right? So we have one, two, three, four full-timers that are already doing great. We have had much success for them. Make that five \u2014 five, because she did not work out either. Five people out of 343 submitted applications worked out. One person is starting at the end of the summer, and three of them, either they accepted and they turned it down, or they ghosted orientation, or they quit week one. So we had multiple people that we had offered that did not work out. So technically, instead of 1.7% of submitted, to be accurate \u2014 you guys know I like my accuracy \u2014 five divided by 343 applications is 1.4%. So 1.4% of submitted applications actually became staff members that worked out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And of course in June, we have hired more, but I just want to focus on the complete month of May. Maybe things have changed in June. I won&#8217;t know till June is over and I can look at that data. But I thought that this was a really good example of we had to ramp things up significantly in order to deal with this crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-6\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">What We Actually Spent<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;And let&#8217;s talk about how much money we spent, okay? So we spent in total \u2014 I know this is going to be a crazy number \u2014 $3,639 in May on Indeed sponsored job listings. Yep, $3,600. We, as I mentioned, offered 10 jobs. Cost per offer extended was $364. Confirmed active or starting \u2014 so that would be five divided by 3,639 \u2014 we spent $727 per actual starting employee. And we ran 14 interview time slots during that month, so multiple interview options a month. And so eight to 10 no-shows absorbed per retained hire. That&#8217;s just interesting. You know, Claude likes to throw interesting data at me. That&#8217;s not particularly useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So what Claude says is that the process is working. 10 offers from 35 people who showed up is a 29% offer rate, and five out of 10 offers converting to active or starting employees is a decent return of those offers. So it is a lot of money, guys. And so for our revenue in May, so you guys get how much we actually spent: our revenue for May was $113,000. We spent $3,639 on Indeed, and that is 3.2% of our revenue we spent on Indeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-7\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Guest Applications<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Quick little break here. If you have ever been listening to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast and thought, &#8220;Oh my gosh, Stephanie would die at this story&#8221; \u2014 well, guess what, guys? I wanna hear that story, okay? We are looking for guest applications for the show. And I know many of you have never been on a podcast before, but those are my favorite episodes, to be frank \u2014 the owners who are just here to share their stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So if you are an owner who wants to share their story, or perhaps you would like to have a free consulting call with me and ask me your questions live for everybody else to learn from, that is also an option. And then finally, if you know somebody in our industry \u2014 you have a friend or somebody that you look up to and have learned from who you think would be a great guest option for us \u2014 please go to the link down in the bio and we would love to see you apply or nominate them, and we will take it from there. And I would love to have a conversation with you and get to know you more closely. Back to the show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-8\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Cost Per Hire in Context<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;So ad cost per retained hire was $727. So we spent $727 to get somebody started. That is a lot of money, 100%. That is a ton of money. I do not discredit that, but when you look at the percentage of revenue, I do not believe that that is out of line considering the situation. Considering we were kind of like very much, we needed to hire right now to get our coverage to make sure that we were bringing in the money. And after going to the Hormozi conference, it was very much, we need to spend, we need to increase spending dramatically and be willing to spend on our constraint, which was hiring at the time. And so at the time \u2014 it&#8217;s always gonna be the constraint, but right now it&#8217;s actually in a good place. We are lowering our Indeed spend. We were spending like $530 a week on Indeed, 530 to $600 a week on Indeed, I believe. So it&#8217;s a lot of money for sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I will remind you guys that we spend basically nothing right now on advertising for customers. There&#8217;s very little being spent on that marketing. And actually, we are going to start flip-flopping that now that we&#8217;re able to ramp down our Indeed and spend more on marketing for clients, because we&#8217;re now at a decent place with hiring. We solved the problem for the most part. Right now, we&#8217;re in a good place, but that can always change. Tomorrow, something could change. So I&#8217;m going to continue to interview. We&#8217;re going to continue to still spend money on Indeed so that our listings are still showing up. So that is not going to go to zero ever again. I have kind of changed my ways of like, I&#8217;m going to have to spend money on this and not be a cheapie when it comes to recruiting costs. And at the size of my business, this is just an expense that I need to be willing to spend. Because when you think about it, every time I have a position that is not filled, that is costing me so much money. Every time we cannot cover something, every time we cannot bring on new customers, it is costing me so much potential money \u2014 way more than what it cost me to get that person in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-9\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Mindset Shift on Spending<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;And so that&#8217;s really what I had to have a mindset shift on. I know I&#8217;ve alluded to this and said this over time that, you know, I&#8217;ve always been historically like, no, don&#8217;t spend money on that. But it&#8217;s because we didn&#8217;t have this huge problem \u2014 I was able to staff. However, if I had just spent money earlier \u2014 like, if I had spent money last year when we were having this problem \u2014 oh my gosh, I can&#8217;t imagine what 2025 would have looked like if I had just bit the bullet and spent money on this. So I would say that that was one of my biggest failure points in 2025: not just spending this money to solve the huge problem that was nose-diving my business and really, really hurting my business, which was staffing and not being able to get new customers in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So when I look at what&#8217;s happening right now with our MRR right now, adding money, it&#8217;s kind of insane. And I&#8217;m like, it&#8217;s because we&#8217;re actually able to keep up with staffing. Even with that crazy turnover, we&#8217;re able to get new customers in, right? In June, we have had 18 first-time clients. Like, that&#8217;s incredible. We have been able to add, I think, 12 recurring clients this month. That&#8217;s incredible because we have the space, and that is all because we&#8217;re able to staff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So it&#8217;s very interesting how I had this big hang-up on spending in that area. And I think it was kind of an identity thing that I was telling myself that was no longer valid, of like, we shouldn&#8217;t have to spend on this because historically we haven&#8217;t had to. But I just want to implore you guys to really start looking at those kinds of thought processes critically in yourself, just like I have had to: Is this hurting me? Is this hurting me because I don&#8217;t want to do it, and I don&#8217;t wanna face the reality of the situation? Nowadays, in this size of business, yeah, I&#8217;m gonna have to spend on recruiting. And it&#8217;s not something I like, it just is something that it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s just like when people don&#8217;t wanna have to pay credit card processing fees. So you are accepting money all over Timbuktu \u2014 Venmo, Cash App, cash, check \u2014 to try to avoid those credit card fees. And it makes it much more difficult for you to do bookkeeping. Not saying it&#8217;s impossible, but it&#8217;s because you don&#8217;t wanna just do a normal credit card processing fee. Like, I understand the thought process, but as you continue to get bigger, you&#8217;re going to have to consolidate and use a credit card processor if you want to make this as seamless as possible from an invoicing perspective, from a bookkeeping perspective. So it&#8217;s that same kind of thing \u2014 I could give so many examples of, I had to change my mind about this. And so this is a huge area of growth. It&#8217;s just me being willing to spend that money. And it&#8217;s like, okay, put your big girl panties on, Stephanie. You are bringing in this much money. This is the size business you have. You&#8217;re gonna have to spend money to keep the recruiting machine going, especially considering this is historically your biggest constraint always. So, like, why would you not spend money to solve the problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-10\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why I Keep Recruiting In-House<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;And as a reminder, I do have an internal HR manager who handles all of the interviewing. I have these things in place, and Crystal is incredibly competent. She&#8217;s so competent, very intelligent. And so for those of you who are like, why aren&#8217;t you using some outside program? Well, they&#8217;re still gonna be using Indeed. They&#8217;re still gonna be doing listings on Indeed. We can do all of that in-house, and I don&#8217;t need them to do the filtering process for me. Because I know there are softwares for recruiting. Indeed is still the biggest hiring platform. So in my opinion, I&#8217;m just gonna cut out the middleman of another filtering system, or another perhaps interviewing system or something like that, where they just give me the qualified leads. I&#8217;m just not interested in doing that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m not saying that that&#8217;s not the right move for you, especially if you guys do not have somebody capable or somebody with the bandwidth to handle all of that in-house as I have with Crystal, my director of HR. So I&#8217;m not saying it&#8217;s the wrong move for you to use a software or tool for recruiting. It&#8217;s just not something that I am going to do at Serene Clean, at least for the time being, until I see an actual reason to do so and to spend that kind of money on that type of thing. Not opposed to it for other businesses, of course, and it may make a lot of sense for you guys, but right now it does not make sense for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-11\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">What&#8217;s Appropriate to Spend on Recruiting<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;So all of that to be said, I did want to ask kind of what is appropriate for recruiting spend and things like that. When Claude gave me all these numbers, I was like, &#8220;Okay, what is actually appropriate to spend?&#8221; I have no basis to know, like, is this too much? Am I spending too much? I have nothing to compare it to. I&#8217;ve never spent anything. So I&#8217;m like, okay, what is industry average? What is just average in general? So, you know, is 3.2% of revenue appropriate?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so what Claude said is, even at that higher rate, you are still well below the national average \u2014 meaning the national average for all-in cost per hire is $4,700 to $5,475. And that is including office jobs, professional roles, and industries with far less no-show chaos than residential cleaning. So competitive for sure. However, it is elevated as to what I want our maintenance spending to be. So typical recruiting spend should be 0.5 to 1.5% of revenue. Recruiting spend during active growth replacement cycles, which is what we were just in, two to 4%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I will say that now I have that number kind of in mind of like, if we are doing okay on staffing, we&#8217;re not feeling the pinch, we&#8217;re able to get people in at a decent amount, I am going to be looking to spend that 0.5 to 1.5%. So as of right now, we bumped it down. So now we are spending $15 a day on each listing that we have active right now. So that is $30 a day because we have two listings going. So that is about $210 to $250 a week, I believe, that we are going to be spending on recruiting just as a bare minimum now going forward. And again, that is at my size business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So if you guys want to take that as a number \u2014 1.5% of your revenue should be spent on recruiting, or that is what you could feel comfortable with. But if you are in very strong growth, or you are ready to push, and this is your biggest constraint, guys, don&#8217;t be afraid to bump it to the two to 4%, is what I&#8217;m going to recommend. This is still preliminary. This is just going off of what I experienced in May. It did solve our problem. And considering our problem is what&#8217;s holding us back from growing the business, I think it&#8217;s well worth it. And so that is kind of what I am going off of going forward \u2014 spending up to 1.5% on recruiting costs as we are doing well. But anytime we are running into the wall again, we are going to up that up to 4% of our revenue spending on recruiting. That may be in the form of adding more job listings because we have a bigger service area. And depending on where we&#8217;re hurting in the service area, we will do specific job listings for that town. So it kind of just depends, like where we&#8217;re hiring, that type of thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-12\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">A Balanced Staffing Picture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I just had my operations meeting with my managers this morning. And right now we are feeling very balanced. I asked my customer relations manager, Katie, where is the demand coming from? Who are the people that are saying yes? And she says it&#8217;s very evenly spread across our service range. And then I go to my HR manager, Crystal, and say, &#8220;Okay, where do we need to hire based on coverage right now?&#8221; And she&#8217;s like, &#8220;We&#8217;re pretty evenly distributed and good.&#8221; So that means that we are not hurting in any specific location of the three locations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She definitely has some desires of like, okay, if we could get evening coverage in Sparta, that would get one of our new hires, Carter, off of driving to that location, where he&#8217;d much prefer to stay in his home base of La Crosse, Onalaska. So that will be more ideal for routing, of course. So that&#8217;s kind of how we&#8217;re thinking \u2014 it would be great to get an evening person in Sparta so that we can get Carter off of that. Et cetera, et cetera. Or looking at these new commercial accounts that we just bid in the past week \u2014 spoiler, we&#8217;ve got some good ones coming down the pipeline, guys. Hopefully, if they all said yes, oh my gosh, that would be thousands and thousands a month. So fingers crossed, I&#8217;m not trying to jinx it, but I&#8217;m really hopeful about some of these new commercial accounts that we have coming in, that they will say yes, but we won&#8217;t know for sure until the earliest July, mid-July, I would imagine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We still, if they all said yes, would be able to cover them with our current staffing, just because we have more full-timers now than I think we&#8217;ve ever had. People tend to be skewing a bit more towards full time of what they&#8217;re looking for, which has kind of been an interesting shift as well. As always, it doesn&#8217;t mean that we&#8217;re opposed to part-timers, it&#8217;s just kind of where our current staffing situation is. So that does allow us to get more clients in with the same amount of staff members. So that is wonderful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-13\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Pulling the Lever That Worked<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;So yeah, it&#8217;s been really interesting to analyze this data, look at it and say, okay, this was just me saying full reign, kind of saying, &#8220;Crystal, spend whatever it is you need, let&#8217;s see what happens, because we need to solve this problem.&#8221; And now her ramping it down and saying, okay, we&#8217;re good right now. And it feels very empowering that we can solve this problem with money. That sounds crazy, I know, but it kind of felt hopeless \u2014 but we&#8217;ve never pulled this lever before. In the history of Serene Clean, we have never ever pulled the lever of spend more on Indeed, on recruiting. And so now that we have, it worked. It worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And of course, this is a one-off month. Maybe in a few months we have a horrible turnover again, for some reason, and we have to hire again. Well, we&#8217;re going to do the same thing. We&#8217;re going to ramp it up and see what happens. But it solved the problem. And so I think it&#8217;s just been really eye-opening for me and a good slap on my wrist of saying, hey, sometimes you need to spend money to solve the problem. And I know that sounds crazy. And I&#8217;ve always been willing to spend the money when it comes to people \u2014 meaning, give them bonuses, treat them well, give them all these wonderful things, the benefits, the higher pay, all of the stuff, right? But I haven&#8217;t been willing to spend the money to bring them in. That&#8217;s like a really \u2014 it&#8217;s very interesting. Like, why have I done that? I&#8217;m not sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I would say for you guys, do not be afraid to spend money on Indeed. Please do group interviews if you would like. I actually \u2014 I&#8217;ll make sure that we drop our job listing down in the show notes. Please don&#8217;t apply, you guys. Don&#8217;t start the application process. It costs me money. Don&#8217;t do that. But you guys can see, you&#8217;re welcome to copy over what we have. Obviously, a lot of it is very specific to Serene Clean \u2014 our benefits, how we pay for mileage, all of that. But you can at least see what that looks like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-14\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Marketing Content and Being a Remote Owner<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;And I will be adding some more video links, &#8217;cause when I was in Wisconsin this past week and a half, I did get a bunch of great content talking to my staff members. That was one of the things I wanted to accomplish there. I got a bunch of video testimonials from clients. And then I also got a bunch of content of my cleaners on the job site, just asking about what it&#8217;s like to work at Serene Clean, why they&#8217;ve stayed, how long they&#8217;ve been here, because I wanna turn that into marketing content. And that works for both getting clients and getting new staff members. So any of the video links you see on the R&amp;D, they might be a little bit old, but that&#8217;s because I just got a fresh new batch of content \u2014 but I have to edit. Oh, I have so much video editing to do. But I do enjoy that. I think it&#8217;s fun. And then I will be turning that into content across our social media, our website, all of that good stuff. So lots of exciting marketing stuff coming down the pipeline because I was able to get up there and get that raw content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I am a remote owner 95% of the time. So when I do go back up, I do like to take advantage of that and get content, instead of having my other managers do it or try to get my other staff to do it. And honestly, it&#8217;s just a really great way to connect and see my staff members and hear from them firsthand. It was just really rewarding, honestly, to see customers, hug some customers, meet new customers, meet new staff members that I hadn&#8217;t met before. And it just overall was really great culturally. So I&#8217;m very happy with how it went down. But all in all, it was a really great trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-15\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">A Great May and a Positive Trajectory<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;It was a great May. May was an incredibly successful month for us. And I&#8217;m feeling so positive about the future of Serene Clean and this trajectory that we are on. Just looking at \u2014 you know, you guys know I like talking about monthly recurring revenue \u2014 looking at MRR in June, we&#8217;re just finishing out the month where we&#8217;ve added $3,400 in net revenue. July, we&#8217;ve already added $4,070 in MRR. So the next month, we&#8217;ve already far surpassed any previous month this year and all of last year. So like, obviously people can cancel, knock on wood, things can happen. But July hasn&#8217;t even started yet, and that&#8217;s where we&#8217;re sitting. And I&#8217;m just feeling so many wonderful things are happening. And I&#8217;m just feeling so positive, because we just made it through what used to be like shit show apocalypse, and we still hit our goals. We surpassed our financial goals. Quality is still there. So a lot of things are happening that are very good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And compared to last year, when it felt like we fumbled so much when this type of shit happened \u2014 like, we didn&#8217;t fumble. And it&#8217;s because I was willing to say, spend money, spend money, spend money, solve the actual problem, instead of just throwing my hands up and being like, guess we&#8217;ll just wait till it passes, instead of doing something about it. So I&#8217;m really happy with that. And it also gives us the mechanism to pull in the future to know what to do in that situation. And also just know, I&#8217;m going to be spending on Indeed just to keep applicants flowing through. So that if somebody does no-call next week that is currently working, or somebody \u2014 we have to fire somebody, right? Like, we still need to have people in our back pocket and people that we are interested in. And we do have a couple of people starting in August too that are going to be full time. So a lot of good things happening, guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I hope that this was useful. So my recommendation for you guys is definitely to be going off of that 0.5 to 1.5% of your revenue being spent on recruiting if this is a problem for you. Even if it&#8217;s not a problem for you, just to get multiple listings up, you need to spend. So whatever is feasible for your business. If this is not a problem for you, okay, great. But this episode was for those of you that it is a problem. And I&#8217;ll be sure to list those Indeed job listings, at least one of them, down below for you guys in the description notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-16\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Wrapping Up<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Give me a kitty emoji if you made it this far. Please hit that hype button if you have not done so. It really helps us get shown to more people who would be interested in this type of content. If you&#8217;re not a member of the Mastermind on Facebook, the ZenMaid Mastermind \u2014 you don&#8217;t have to be a ZenMaid customer to join and ask lots of great questions. That&#8217;s where I get a lot of my ideas from for episodes, is the Mastermind, and I try to interact as much as I possibly can there as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hit that like, hit that subscribe on YouTube. Please leave us a review on Spotify if you can do so. It really helps us get to more cleaning business owners like yourself. And as we have mentioned, we have opened up applications for being a guest on the podcast. We got so many, I&#8217;m so excited to have all of these conversations, guys. So please, if you are interested in being on the podcast, if you&#8217;ve got a story to tell, I would love to hear it. Please go apply. We&#8217;ll leave that linked down below as well. And I&#8217;ll see you in the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners. Thanks guys, bye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Listen on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Introduction Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean. And in today&#8217;s episode, I want to share the numbers behind our hiring and ad spend for the month of May. I know it&#8217;s the end of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":17457,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"Why 57% of My Interview Confirmations Never Showed Up","_seopress_titles_desc":"Stephanie breaks down Serene Clean's May hiring funnel and Indeed ad spend \u2014 395 applications, a 57% no-show rate, and what to spend on recruiting.","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-podcast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17456"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17460,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17456\/revisions\/17460"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}