02.02.07

Salary for the New Maid

Posted in Hiring A Maid at 9:14 am

If you’re new – I wrote the How to Hire A Maid like a book. Click Table of Contents for future articles and links to old blogs in a more comprehensible order – or just click here & go to the bottom to read it straight through by scrolling up to each article.

When you’re asking your friends for recommendations for maids ask what they pay.  If they tell you a total amount try & find out how many hours they think they’re buying.

You’ve already estimated the minimum time you’re really going to need your maid for. Tell her you need her for that amount of time and how often you will need her. Ask how much per hour she charges. She will probably give you a price for the whole house.

Sanity check the amount. How big is your house compared to your friends’ homes?  How much is cheap housing within 30-40 minutes of your house? If the salary is very low, she’s counting on cutting time.  Don’t worry if the amount she cites is below your estimate. You’ll want to give her a raise after 3 months if she works out.

Don’t forget to ask when she takes a vacation, if she works holidays & how she handles missed days. Does she make them up during another part of the week, come longer the next time or just skip them? Be prepared to specify if you plan to pay her the normal salary while she is on vacation.

Arrange for her to come the time you calculated that she will need her to clean your whole house even though that’s not what she will be doing for a while.

Don’t worry if your salary conversation comes down to a simple she says she’ll clean your house for x and you say OK. (Nobody really likes salary conversations.) With luck she will turn out so well you will happily be giving her a raise shortly and volunteering to pay her salary while on vacation because she makes your life so much better.

Coming Monday (sorry this post & the last Maid post were so dry )

Maids should not be permitted to gas themselves with Comet / Windex concoctions.

02.01.07

The Interview For A New Maid

Posted in Hiring A Maid at 6:34 pm

If you’re new – I wrote the How to Hire A Maid like a book. Click Table of Contents for future articles and links to old blogs in a more comprehensible order – or just click here & go to the bottom to read it straight through by scrolling up to each article.

 

At some point the potential maid comes to see your house, gives you a price and sets up a schedule.

You need to make the following point extremely clear:

You do not want her to clean your whole house in one visit. You are just hiring her to clean two or three rooms at a time. You have another maid that cleans the whole house. 

You are going to have a checklist for each of your rooms as you walk through your house. Show her the list, talk and act through each item (quickly). Ask when she is available and when she needs to leave.   Try to find out how booked she is. Maids are very reluctant to reveal how many people they are really working for. I don’t know if they think that their employers are out to report them to the IRS for the 10% cut of the unreported income or they think they can fool their employers over the length of time they’re really at the house. The answer she gives you can only be regarded as a best-case answer.