Cleaner CV Examples & Writing Guide

This sample is for a cleaner who moved from hotel housekeeping to leading a night team on an office campus. The name and employers are made up. The numbers are the kind a cleaning supervisor actually tracks: floor area, rooms per shift, audit scores, supply costs and safety record.

Cleaning jobs get a lot of applicants, and turnover is high. The person hiring is usually an operations or area manager at a contract cleaning company, a head housekeeper at a hotel, or a facilities manager. They are trying to answer four questions before they call you.

• Will you turn up? Attendance is the number one reason cleaners lose their jobs. Put it on the page: "zero missed shifts in 24 months", "full attendance award 2025". If you can work nights, weekends or early mornings, say so in your personal statement. Most office cleaning happens before 8 am or after 6 pm.
• Have you cleaned this kind of building? Offices, hotel rooms, healthcare, schools, warehouses, food factories and builders' cleans are different jobs. Name the building type and its size (square metres, number of rooms or toilets) for every job.
• Can you run the equipment and handle the chemicals? Scrubber dryer, burnisher, carpet extractor, backpack vacuum, pressure washer. Dilution ratios, contact times, COSHH and safety data sheets. List the ones you have actually used.
• Can we trust you in the building? Cleaners work alone, at night, with keys and alarm codes. A DBS check where the site needs one, a driving licence, a lost property record with no complaints and a safety record with no incidents all answer this question.

“I do not need a paragraph about attention to detail. I need to know what floors you have stripped, whether you can pass a clinic hygiene audit, and whether you were at work every night last winter. Show me those three and you get a call.”

Most cleaner CVs copy the duties list from a job advert: "swept floors, emptied bins, cleaned toilets". Everyone did that. The fix is to add the size of the job, the standard you met and one number a supervisor could check. Here are seven rewrites using real cleaning duties.

A skills section for a cleaner is a short, specific list of what you can do and operate. Hiring managers scan it for the equipment and building types in their job. Put the practical skills first, then the soft skills that matter in this work. Ten to fourteen items is plenty.

• Cleaning and hygiene: washroom disinfection, high-touch surface cleaning, terminal cleaning (healthcare), kitchen and staff room cleaning, window and glass cleaning, high and low dusting, waste and recycling handling.
• Floor care: sweeping and mopping (two-bucket method), scrubber dryer, burnisher, stripping and resealing vinyl floors, carpet extraction and spot cleaning, wood and stone floor care, pressure washing.
• Chemical and safety knowledge: COSHH, safety data sheets, dilution ratios and contact times, colour-coded microfibre system, PPE use, body fluid spill kits, manual handling.
• Hotel housekeeping: room turnover, bed making to brand standard, linen and laundry handling, minibar and amenity restocking, lost property procedure.
• Soft skills that count here: reliability and punctuality, working alone without supervision, discretion around tenants and guests, physical stamina (lifting up to 20 kg, standing 8 hours), following a checklist exactly, basic English plus any other language.

Two or three lines at the top. Say what kind of cleaning you do and for how long, the building types, one or two numbers, and your availability. Use a personal statement if you have experience. Use a career objective (one line about the job you want plus what you bring) only if you have never been paid to clean.

Many cleaning jobs are open to people with no paid cleaning history. The company will train you on chemicals and machines. What they cannot train is turning up, working alone and being careful. Your CV has to prove those three things with whatever you have done so far.

1. 1Start with a career objective that names the job and your availability (evenings, weekends, early mornings). Availability is the first thing a scheduler looks for.
2. 2List any job at all, even a short one, and pull out the parts that look like cleaning work: closing duties at a restaurant, stacking shelves at 5 am, cleaning kennels at a rescue centre, clearing up a building site. Add one number (shifts a week, months without an absence, size of the space).
3. 3Add unpaid work: cleaning a church, a school, a gym or a relative's rental flats; caring that included housework; helping in a family cleaning business. Give dates and how often.
4. 4Add a short skills list with what you already know: mopping, vacuuming, bathroom cleaning, laundry, reading product labels, lifting up to 20 kg, standing for a full shift.
5. 5If you can get a free or cheap certificate before you apply, do it: COSHH awareness or a short cleaning course is often available online for under £50, and some colleges and Jobcentre Plus offices can point you to free courses. One line under Education.

No licence is needed to work as a cleaner in the UK, and most training happens on the job. But a few certificates are recognised across the industry and make an application stand out, especially for healthcare, school and food factory work. List them under a Certificates heading with the year.

• IOSH Working Safely: a one-day health and safety course recognised across UK workplaces. Some contractors ask for it on industrial or public sector sites; nice to have everywhere else.
• Body fluid spill and infection control training: hospitals, care homes, schools, gyms and hotels usually ask for it or provide it, because you may have to clean up blood, vomit or other body fluids with a spill kit. Often refreshed every year in healthcare.
• COSHH awareness: under the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations your employer must train you on the chemicals you use; if you have completed it, list it. It shows you can read safety data sheets and labels.
• British Institute of Cleaning Science (BICSc) training, such as the Cleaning Operator's Proficiency Certificate (COPC): the industry body's skills scheme. Valued by contract cleaners, councils and facilities companies.
• Healthcare cleaning standards: knowing the NHS National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness 2021 (functional risk ratings, cleaning audits) and infection prevention training helps in hospitals, clinics and GP surgeries.
• Driving licence and DBS check: many companies send cleaners between sites in vans, and schools and care settings need a DBS check. Put the licence in your contact line.

Large contract cleaning companies, hotel chains, NHS trusts and councils run applications through an applicant tracking system (ATS) that reads the file before a person does. Small local companies just print it out. A plain one-page layout works for both.

• One page. Even with 15 years of cleaning, one page is enough; list older jobs in one line each.
• Order: contact line with mobile, availability and driving licence; personal statement or career objective; skills; work history (newest first); certificates; education. Cleaning managers read the skills and availability first.
• Standard headings (Experience, Skills, Certificates, Education), one column, a normal font, no photo, no date of birth, no icons, no coloured boxes. Save as a PDF unless the advert asks for Word.
• Mirror the advert's words once each: "commercial cleaning", "contract cleaning", "cleaning operative", "housekeeping", "hygiene", "floor care", "washroom", "disinfect", "COSHH", the machine names, and "night shift" or the shift they list. If the advert says "cleaning operative", use that phrase, not only "cleaner".
• The US and Canada call this document a "cleaner resume". Same rules: no photo, no date of birth, one page, plain layout. US employers ask for OSHA 10 and bloodborne pathogens training where a UK employer would ask for COSHH awareness.

Paste the job advert into the cvplex ATS checker with your CV. It shows which words from the advert you are missing ("floor care", "disinfection", "COSHH") and whether your skills list parsed as one.