You’re handing someone a key to your house. Or a garage code. Or you’re just not going to be home while they’re there. Whatever the arrangement, you’re trusting a stranger with access to the place where your family sleeps and your stuff lives. “We background-check our cleaners” gets said a lot in this industry. It’s worth knowing what’s actually behind that sentence before you take it at face value.
What a real background check actually checks
Every cleaner on our team goes through a background check before they ever set foot in a client’s home. We use Checkr, which is one of the background check providers most companies (Uber, Instacart, and plenty of others) actually run their screening through — not a database some company built in-house, and not a $20 online search that mostly just confirms someone’s address history.
The check screens for a history of violent crime, theft, illegal drug offenses, and sexual offenses. If any of that turns up, the candidate doesn’t get hired. Simple as that.
Why you can’t just see the report
People sometimes ask if they can see the actual background check for whoever’s coming to their house. We can’t share it — not because we’re hiding something, but because the law doesn’t let us. Background checks are covered under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and the report itself is confidential between the company and the candidate. Releasing someone’s personal background report to a third party would violate both the law and our contract with the screening provider.
What we can tell you is that the check happened, what it screens for, and that nobody with a disqualifying history is on our team. That’s the same standard you’d get from any legitimate employer running background checks on staff.
Why this is actually a W-2 thing
Here’s the part a lot of people don’t think about: a background check is only as good as the relationship behind it. When a cleaner is our employee, we ran the check, we know the result, and we’re the ones accountable if we got it wrong. That’s very different from a company that dispatches independent contractors — people who may have background-checked themselves once, years ago, for a totally different app or gig, with no ongoing relationship to the company sending them to your door.
“Background-checked” means something different depending on who’s doing the checking and how recently. Worth asking any company you’re considering: who ran the check, when, and are these people actually your employees?
Why You Should Demand Transparency in Your Cleaning Service
You shouldn’t have to take “we background-check our cleaners” on faith. Ask which provider they use, what the check screens for, and whether the person coming to your house is an employee or a contractor. If a company can’t answer those questions plainly, that tells you something too.
Every cleaner we send into your home is a W-2 employee, background-checked through Checkr, before their first day on the job.