A cleaner’s profile has one job: to help you decide whether she can do the work you need done. It is not a portrait and it is not a popularity contest. Yet most of the ways households in Botswana find a cleaner – a Facebook post, a forwarded number, a photograph passed between neighbours – lead with exactly the wrong information, the things that tell you nothing about the work and everything about appearance. A profile that assesses capability, and only capability, is the difference between a shortlist you can trust and a stack of faces you are guessing between.
This matters because most domestic cleaners work in the informal economy, where a person’s record lives in her own memory and a few phone numbers rather than in anything a stranger can check. Government policy has begun to take that economy seriously. The Informal Sector Recovery Plan, developed with United Nations Development Programme support, sets out to move informal workers towards formalisation and decent work; the Assistant Minister of Trade and Entrepreneurship, Mr Baratiwa Mathoothe, framed it as building the foundations for a sector long treated as invisible. Cleaners sit squarely inside that sector, and much of it is women-led. A profile built around work, not looks, is a small piece of the same formalisation – it lets a cleaner be judged on what she has actually done. Here are the six things it should tell you.
1. Where she works
Area comes first because it decides almost everything else. A cleaner in Mogoditshane looking for work in Phakalane faces a commute that will shape her hours, her cost and how long she is likely to stay. A useful profile states the areas she covers plainly, so you are not shortlisting someone for whom your address is quietly unworkable. Geography is not a detail to sort out later; it is the first filter, and a listing that hides it wastes everyone’s morning.
2. What she has actually done
Experience should be specific, not a number of years floating free of context. Has she run a household of five, cleaned offices after hours, handled a guest house changeover, ironed for a family that cared about it? The kind of experience matters more than the length. A profile that says “three years, private homes in Gaborone West” tells you something you can use; one that says “hardworking and honest” tells you only that someone wrote an advertisement.
3. The duties she is offering
Cleaning is not one skill. Some people are quick and thorough on floors and surfaces but do not iron; some cook, some mind children, some will not. A profile should name the duties on offer so you can match them to the ones you need, rather than discovering the mismatch in week two. This is also where honesty protects the worker: a cleaner who does not cook is better off saying so than being hired to clean and pressed into a kitchen she never agreed to. Specificity here saves both sides a wasted month, because a duty named in the profile is a duty that was chosen rather than assumed, and it gives you a concrete basis for the rate you will later agree.
4. When she is available
Availability turns interest into a shortlist. Full days or mornings, three days or five, live-out or open to live-in, starting now or next month – these decide in seconds whether a match is even possible. A profile that states the days and the pattern lets you skip every listing that cannot fit your household, and it spares the cleaner the interviews that were never going to work around her own commitments.
5. The arrangement she is looking for
Live-in and live-out are different jobs, not two settings of one, and a profile should say which the cleaner wants. Someone seeking a live-out day-rate arrangement and someone seeking a live-in monthly post are answering different questions about their lives, and pretending the choice can be settled after hiring is how both sides end up disappointed. Naming the arrangement up front keeps the conversation honest before anyone’s hopes are raised.
6. What has been verified – and what has not
The last field is the one that separates a real profile from a hopeful one: has anything been checked, and by whom? A listing on Kleana shows a cleaner’s skills, area, rate and verification tier but withholds her name, photograph and number until an introduction is made – so nobody is pre-judged on anything except what they can do. Its two tiers are labelled honestly. “Declared” means she has given a working email and accepted the charter, but her identity has not yet been checked and no former employer has been called. “Kleana Verified” means a person has sighted her Omang or passport and telephoned at least one long-term reference. A good profile does not claim everything is confirmed; it tells you exactly what is.
Shortlist on capability
The move that matters is to read the work before you read anything else, and to refuse to shortlist on a face. Ask for the six fields – area, experience, duties, availability, arrangement, verification – whether you are building a profile for a cleaner you want to help place or reading one for a household you run. Where the information is missing, ask for it before you meet, not after. A profile that answers those six questions is doing the honest work of matching a person to a job. Anything that leads with a photograph is doing something else entirely.
Source: Kleana Africa – kleana.africa
