A domestic staffing agency places maids, cooks, drivers, nannies and caregivers in homes. Trust and continuity are what households buy, and the agency's own team must record who is placed where and respond quickly to absences.
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Share your requirementsA domestic staffing agency supplies maids, cooks, drivers, nannies, elder-care helpers and cleaners to homes, usually on a monthly or hourly basis. Households judge it on reliability and trust, and notice every missed day. Workers come from many places and backgrounds, and some have no written records. The agency's own staff match workers to homes, make calls, visit households and chase fees and replacements. A worker's pay may be paid by the household directly or through the agency. Disputes about hours, leave, advance payments and conduct are frequent, and the worker is often a woman travelling far for a small wage. The agency stands between both sides and is blamed by each. See also HR for facility management.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in domestic staffing agencies. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
The household has no help and calls the agency in the first hour.
Money lent to a worker by a household or the agency is tracked in notebooks, and disputes follow when she leaves.
The agency cannot easily say where a worker lives, who her family is or who to call in an emergency.
A household adds tasks one by one, and the worker ends up doing far more than agreed.
Households report theft or rudeness, and workers report harassment or unpaid wages, with nothing neutral to settle it.
A good worker is poached by a neighbour, and the agency loses its fee.
Pay, leave and placement history live in personal phones and are lost when staff leave.
Coordinators absorb calls from upset households and anxious workers, and the best ones tire quickly.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Employee Administration; Employee Relations; Compensation, Payroll and Benefits. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for facility management, not in general.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a domestic staffing agencies business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Identity, contact, address, emergency contact, skills, placements and pay arrangements in one shared record.
Identity, contact, address, emergency contact, skills, placements and pay arrangements in one shared record. See employee information management.
Hours, tasks, weekly off, leave, pay date and advance rules in a short written note both sides can read in their language.
Hours, tasks, weekly off, leave, pay date and advance rules in a short written note both sides can read in their language.
A simple ledger, a cap and a repayment plan agreed with the worker.
A simple ledger, a cap and a repayment plan agreed with the worker. The payroll process work supports it.
Workers who can fill in for a day or a week, shown to the household beforehand.
Workers who can fill in for a day or a week, shown to the household beforehand.
A phone line, a written log and a named person who hears each side.
A phone line, a written log and a named person who hears each side. The grievance and disciplinary process supports it.
A script for hard calls, fixed call hours and a rota so no one carries the phone alone.
A script for hard calls, fixed call hours and a rota so no one carries the phone alone.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
A single worker and placement record that does not depend on one person's phone.
A clear record of pay, advances and deductions for workers.
Fair hearing for complaints from households and from workers.
Plain terms of placement that both sides can read and sign.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in facility management, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Housekeeping, technician and security staff at client sites leave for reasons head office rarely hears. How to ask, what to look for and how to act on it.
7 min readRead article
Payroll says one joining date, the personal file says another and the manager remembers a third. How to establish a single trustworthy employee record and keep it that way.
7 min readRead article
An employee brings you a complaint about their supervisor. What happens next should not depend on who is in the room. A grievance procedure a small company can actually run.
8 min readRead article
Simple variable pay structures for product and engineering teams: four options, why individual metrics backfire, a build plan and a one page outline to adapt.
6 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Name, address, emergency contact, hours, tasks, weekly off, pay, pay date and advance rules. Share it with both sides in a language they understand.
Record each, agree a repayment plan and cap the amount. Do not allow open-ended lending. Tell the worker what is owed each month.
Record what was said, avoid accusing anyone, suggest the household seek proper advice and keep the worker's side on file. Do not take the law into your own hands.
Treat workers well, be fair on fees and keep contact with households. Explain the agency's role clearly so both sides know why it exists.
Look at last quarter's absences and exits, and keep enough people who have been introduced to households. Review quarterly.
We would ask where worker records are kept, how terms are told to both sides and how complaints are heard. A good opening project is a worker record, a placement note and a complaints route. Scope is written down for you to accept or change.
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