There is no industry standard behind either word. Screening runs from a real background check on every hire to nothing at all; training is almost always learned on the job. So the honest way to vet a commercial cleaning company is to skip the adjectives and ask for artifacts: a screening claim published in writing, a task checklist built for your floor, and proof after each visit.
The two questions themselves are not the problem. “How do you screen your employees?” and “What kind of training do your employees receive?” sit on nearly every commercial vetting checklist, and every salesperson has rehearsed them. The problem is that both invite a prepared answer, and a prepared answer costs nothing. What this guide adds is the follow-up that does cost something: where is that written down, and how would I check it?
Screening: the staffing model decides who was actually checked
Commercial cleaning runs on two staffing models. Some companies clean with their own employees; others fill contracts through layers of subcontractors. Neither model is dishonest by itself — but they answer the screening question differently, because a company can truthfully say “we screen our people” while the crew inside your building works for a subcontractor that sentence never covered. So the useful version of the first question is: does your screening cover every person who will enter my building, under whichever company name they work?
The second follow-up is where the claim lives. A screening claim that exists only in a proposal PDF disappears with the salesperson; one published on a page is a commitment anyone can re-read months later. JAS keeps its own in the insurance section of the legal page, one sentence long: “$2,000,000 general liability coverage · every cleaner background-checked”. That is the entire claim, and we are not going to dress it up here with figures the site does not publish.
And when a vendor does hand you a number — “one hundred percent of our staff is screened” — ask which record it came from. Our transparency page lists “Background-checked” among its team metrics and states the rule those figures live under: they publish “from the payroll record, never from a marketing estimate”. A percentage nobody can trace is an adjective wearing a number’s clothes. And if the door a stranger will walk through is your home rather than your building, the residential version of this question has its own guide: do cleaning companies run background checks?
Training: there is no diploma, so ask for the artifact
“What kind of training do your employees receive?” is the harder question to ask well, because the uncomfortable truth is that commercial cleaning has no universal credential a buyer can independently check. No answer you receive — shift shadowing, videos, a certification with an impressive acronym — is verifiable from where you sit. That does not make the training fake; it makes the claim unverifiable, which is a different thing. So stop auditing the classroom and audit what the classroom is supposed to produce.
A trained crew is a crew trained to a list. Our office cleaning page puts it concretely: “Office cleans look different per industry — financial offices need quiet vacuums, medical clinics need EPA-list disinfectants, creative studios need fragrance-free care for fabric. We build a custom checklist per floor”. The checklist is the training made visible: it is what tells this month’s crew exactly what last month’s crew did, in what order, to what standard. If a vendor cannot show you the list your floor would get, then the training — whatever it was — lives in whoever happens to remember it.
The artifact has a second half: proof the list was run. The janitorial services page promises the first — “You get the exact task list in writing before the first visit” — and CleanCheck covers the second: on eligible completed visits, the report includes that visit’s checklist status and customer-safe photos. Notice what this replaces: you are no longer asked to evaluate a training program you cannot see; you are reading, visit by visit, whether its output showed up on your floor.
“You cannot audit a vendor’s classroom. You can audit the checklist they put in writing and the report from last night’s visit. Demand the second and the first takes care of itself.”
“Who will actually be cleaning my office?”
This is the question hiding under the other two, and in Miami it has a concrete setting: the crew usually arrives after your team has gone home, on the 6pm–10pm evening shift the janitorial page describes as the default for commercial work. Access here is not informal. In a Brickell tower or a board-run condo, “keys, alarm codes, freight elevators, or lobby access” are coordinated “directly with your office or property manager before the first visit” — that same page’s words — and the building will want the vendor file before anyone badges in. Ours is published on the office page: $2M general liability, a COI naming your building as certificate holder within 2 business hours, a W-9 on request, and background-checked teams.
Then ask one more question no checklist includes: what happens when the crew changes? On a recurring scope, people eventually rotate — vacations, growth, turnover — and no vendor can honestly promise you the same faces forever. What a serious vendor can promise is that the standard does not rotate with them: the same written checklist, the same per-visit report, screening that covers the new person before their first shift, and a heads-up to your property manager instead of an unfamiliar face at the door.
Vet monthly, not once
Screening and training questions get asked once, at the walkthrough — but the failure they guard against arrives in month six, when the standard slips slowly enough that nobody can point at the week it happened. The structural answer sits on the janitorial page, in one paragraph: “No long-term lock-in — we earn the contract every visit. You approve a written scope of work and a price, we hold that schedule, and you are billed after each completed visit rather than prepaying a term. If the standard slips, the CleanCheck report from that visit is the evidence to bring us, and we fix it”. Read that as a screening question in disguise: a vendor willing to be judged after every visit has a very different relationship with its own training than one already holding a prepaid year.
Five questions for the walkthrough
None of these needs cleaning expertise. Each has a checkable answer, and a dodge on any of the five is information too.
- 1. "How do you screen your employees?" — and does that cover every person who will enter my building, including anyone subcontracted?
- 2. Where is your screening and insurance claim published, on a page I can re-read — not only inside the proposal?
- 3. "What kind of training do your employees receive?" — and what written checklist does my floor get before the first visit?
- 4. How do I know, after each visit, that the checklist was actually run?
- 5. When the crew changes, how am I told — and does the new person clear the same screening before their first shift?
The short version
Screening is real when it covers everyone who enters and lives somewhere you can read it. Training is real when it ends in a written task checklist and a per-visit report — the two artifacts no adjective can fake. Take both questions to the walkthrough, and when you move on to the paperwork, our guide to what a commercial cleaning contract should include covers the other clauses that keep month six honest.
Part of the JAS operating playbook, not legal or hiring advice: how we would vet any vendor — ourselves included — before handing over a building key.