The cleaning industry has a retention problem, and it hits hardest in the first few weeks on the job. Industry estimates point to annual turnover rates in commercial cleaning that many describe as alarming, with new hires exiting before they’ve had time to settle in. The culprits, experts say, go well beyond pay. Confusion, poor onboarding, lack of support, inconsistent communication, and unrealistic expectations all play a role—leaving workers feeling disconnected from the team before they’ve had a real chance to succeed.
Wells Ye with Employjoy has spent years studying what drives early turnover in the cleaning industry and what companies can do to stop it. His conclusion may surprise some: By the time a new hire walks through the door, the outcome may already be decided.
Most turnover starts before day one
When asked about early warning signs that a new hire is checking out mentally, Ye pointed first to isolation—a feeling that shows up with troubling consistency in exit feedback.
“The feedback from new hires is still very high—feel isolated, feel not fully trained, thrown into the work and not ready to do the job, but actually fighting alone,” Ye said. “So this feedback is amazing—it’s still very high.”
That kind of feedback frustrates managers who feel they’ve done their part. The real problem, Ye said, is that much of the damage happens earlier—during recruiting.
“In my opinion, many turnovers in the first 60 days happened already determined a long time ago,” he said. “We are talking about recruiting.”
Ye identified three specific ways recruiting drives early turnover. The first is simply hiring the wrong person. The second is creating a mismatch between what the candidate imagines the job to be and what it is—a gap that opens when companies fail to honestly communicate both the strengths and the challenges of the role. The third, and perhaps the most overlooked, is the failure to carry recruiting data into onboarding.
“When we recruit somebody, we actually know the reason we recruited them,” Ye said. “Maybe they’re good with teamwork, maybe they have some good physical work history, they have good customer service capability—they also have some weakness, often identified during the recruiting process. But all this information is not used. Just like there’s a cliff—disconnect completely when people come in.”
Use what you already know
Ye’s point is straightforward: companies gather useful information about candidates during recruiting, then ignore it the moment someone is hired. That data, he said, should be informing how new employees are trained and managed from day one.
“For example, if someone is a little bit weak in teamwork, by the time we start training them, we need to really understand that’s one part of weakness, then we train a little more about how we work together,” he said. “We also maybe create a solo cleaning opportunity for this person, because he or she feels comfortable to do so. The recruiting information is often not used to optimize the onboarding, the training, and further management.”
The goal, Ye said, is customization—making new hires feel seen and respected as individuals, not processed like interchangeable bodies.
The pressure to rush makes everything worse
One reason companies skip proper onboarding is urgency. Staffing shortages put pressure on managers to get new hires productive as quickly as possible, and that rush often backfires.
“There’s a shortage of staffing, there’s higher turnover. So people are waiting for someone to come in, to kick in, to be productive,” Ye said. “That rush can cause exactly all these bad first impressions—isolation, not ready, not supported.”
When asked whether the problem is about finding good people—a common complaint among owners and managers—Ye pushed back. The issue, he said, usually isn’t the quality of the applicants. It’s the systems surrounding them.
Build a feedback loop—and keep it running
Even with strong recruiting and a solid first day, the work isn’t finished. Ye recommends a structured check-in process throughout the 60-day window, with feedback flowing from multiple directions.
“The feedback loop comes from the new hire themselves, but also from the trainers who are assessing this person and scoring them at a certain frequency, so a manager can see it and kick in to help,” he said.
That ongoing data collection, especially when layered on top of recruiting assessment information, gives managers the context they need to act early—before a new hire becomes another turnover statistic.
Ye noted that among his clients, first-week and first-two-week turnover remains disproportionately high, which he takes as confirmation that the problem is rooted in what happens at the very beginning of the employment relationship.
What owners and managers can do now
The practical takeaway from Ye’s framework is that reducing turnover in the first 60 days requires looking backward—into the recruiting process—as much as forward into training and management. Companies should audit how honestly they describe job conditions to candidates, whether they’re surfacing and using personality and skills data gathered during hiring, and whether managers have a structured check-in rhythm that catches problems early.
The goal isn’t just retaining warm bodies. It’s building the kind of environment where new hires feel welcomed, trained, and set up to succeed—starting on day one.
