Hiring Without an HR Department

For many small and mid-sized cleaning companies, the human resources (HR) department consists of one person: The owner.

That same owner may be recruiting employees, reviewing applications, conducting interviews, onboarding new hires, handling paperwork, managing employee concerns, meeting with customers, overseeing operations, and trying to grow the business. Hiring becomes another responsibility competing for attention in an already crowded day.

Wells Ye, founder of EmployJoy.ai, knows that challenge firsthand. When he started his cleaning company 17 years ago, he joked that one of his many titles was “janitor of the office.” More importantly, he learned how easily recruiting can consume an owner’s time without necessarily producing better hiring results.

For cleaning companies without a dedicated HR department, Ye believes the answer begins with refusing to accept poor hiring results as simply part of doing business.

Stop accepting turnover as inevitable

Employee turnover has long been one of the toughest workforce challenges in the cleaning industry. But Ye cautioned owners against treating high turnover as something they cannot change.

“Are we accepting the status quo?” Ye asked. That question should be the starting point for any company struggling to recruit and retain employees. Instead of assuming turnover is inevitable, owners should examine whether their recruiting system is producing the results they need.

Ye also encouraged owners to consider a cost that does not always appear on a financial statement: The value of the time they personally spend recruiting.

At one point in his career, Ye estimated he was spending 15 to 20 hours each week on recruiting. Initially, doing the work himself appeared to save the company money. Looking back, however, he recognized another side of the equation.

“The real cost is what I wasn’t doing,” Ye said. Those hours were not being spent on marketing, sales, management, and other activities that could help build the company.

For a small business owner, that opportunity cost can be high. Saving money by handling recruiting internally may not actually save money if it prevents the owner from focusing on higher-value responsibilities.

Don’t choose between speed and quality

Cleaning companies often need employees quickly. A new contract may require additional workers immediately, or an unexpected departure can leave an operation short-staffed.

That urgency can create what appears to be an unavoidable choice: Hire quickly or hire carefully. Ye rejected that premise. “I would like to say that I want to have both,” Ye said.

The goal, he explained, should be a recruiting system capable of delivering qualified employees quickly. Companies that cannot currently accomplish both should resist the temptation to simply lower their standards to fill positions faster. Instead, they should determine why their current process is falling short.

“We need to benchmark,” Ye said. That means examining the existing recruiting process, measuring its performance, and identifying the root causes behind poor results. How long does hiring take? Where are applicants dropping out? Are new employees staying? Are job expectations clear? Is compensation competitive?

Understanding the answers can help owners improve the system rather than continually reacting to staffing emergencies.

Watch the first 60 days

One of Ye’s preferred measurements is remarkably straightforward: Look at what happens to employees during their first 60 days.

Specifically, determine how many new hires leave before reaching the 60-day mark. “If that number is commonly more than 50%, that’s way too high,” Ye said. “That’s indicating that our recruiting system is not working.”

Ye said he would like to see first-60-day turnover below 30%, and ideally below 25%. That measurement can provide owners with an early warning that something in the recruiting or onboarding process needs attention. Continually replacing employees who leave within weeks creates an expensive cycle of advertising, interviewing, hiring, training, and starting over.

But Ye cautioned against automatically blaming recruiting. The job itself also deserves scrutiny.

Companies should benchmark their pay, benefits, schedules, and other employment conditions against competing opportunities in their market. If the position itself is not competitive, improving interview techniques alone will not solve the retention problem. “If we are not competitive, it’s a real issue,” Ye added.

Know when to ask for help

Once owners benchmark their results and examine the job they are offering, they may discover they still cannot achieve the hiring performance they need.

At that point, Ye believes they should consider another option: Outsourcing some or all of the recruiting process. He described the choice as “done by you” versus “done for you.”

With the first approach, the owner or internal team manages recruiting, screening, interviewing, and other steps. That can provide control, but it also requires time. And for an owner already wearing multiple hats, every hour spent recruiting is an hour unavailable elsewhere.

A done-for-you approach can shift much of that workload to a recruiting provider that screens candidates before presenting finalists to the employer. The business owner still makes the hiring decision but spends less time finding and evaluating the initial candidate pool. “The judgment is still yours,” Ye explained. “You still decide.”

Another difference is continuity. An owner may stop recruiting when customer demands or operational problems require attention. An outside recruiting process can continue even when the owner is occupied elsewhere. “When you are busy and away, hiring never stops,” Ye said of the outsourced approach.

Ye stressed that owners should evaluate the actual economics rather than assuming doing everything internally is automatically cheaper. “We need to do the real math, not the superficial math,” he advised.

That calculation should include advertising, staff or owner time, the consequences of a poor hire, and the opportunity cost of diverting leadership away from sales, marketing, customer relationships, and business development.

Outsourcing will not necessarily be the right answer for every company. If an internal recruiting system consistently delivers strong results, there may be little reason to change it. But if the company continues struggling despite attempts to improve its process, outside expertise becomes another tool available to the owner.

After benchmarking the process and reviewing the job design, Ye said companies that still face hiring problems should “really consider the possibility of outsourcing.”

Don’t overlook compliance

Hiring without an HR department creates another challenge that extends beyond finding employees: Compliance.

Small employers are still responsible for navigating employment requirements, even if they do not have an HR professional on staff.

Ye recommended seeking expert assistance where necessary rather than relying on a full-time employee for expertise. A consultant or specialist can help a company address areas requiring knowledge the owner may not possess.

He pointed to three areas deserving particular attention: I-9 employment eligibility requirements, worker classification and changing wage requirements, and emerging rules governing the use of artificial intelligence in hiring.

AI presents an especially fast-moving challenge. Employers increasingly have access to tools that can assist with recruiting and applicant screening, while applicants themselves are also using AI.

Ye said companies using these technologies need to consider issues involving applicant notice, anti-discrimination testing, documentation, opportunities for human review, and vendor accountability. “If you use any of these tools, the vendor needs to be accountable to make sure that the tools comply with the newest and highly emerging AI laws,” Ye said.

For an owner without formal HR training, the larger lesson is simple: Know when a hiring issue moves beyond ordinary business management and requires specialized guidance.

Build a system instead of fighting fires

Hiring without an HR department does not mean hiring without a strategy.

The goal is to move away from repeatedly reacting to vacancies and toward building a measurable process. Owners can begin by tracking results, particularly early turnover, and then examine the job itself, the recruiting process, and the time required to manage it.

If the system works, continue improving it. If it does not, identify why. And if the company lacks the time or expertise to fix it internally, outside specialists or recruiting providers may be worth considering.

Most importantly, Ye encouraged small- and mid-sized cleaning companies not to assume that today’s hiring challenges represent the best they can do.

Companies can improve through internal audits, better systems, specialist assistance, or outsourcing, he explained. The objective is to stop treating excessive turnover as an unavoidable cost of doing business and start treating recruiting as a business process that can be measured, evaluated, and improved.