Office Cleaner CV Examples & Writing Guide

This is a commercial cleaner who works nights in an office building for a contract cleaning company. The name and the companies are made up. Notice the numbers: floor area, toilet areas, audit scores and attendance. Those are the facts a cleaning supervisor uses to work out whether you can hold a route.

Contract cleaning companies lose contracts over two things: complaints from the client and cleaners who do not turn up. Your CV has to answer both worries in the first six lines.

• How much space you cover and in how long. Floor area in square metres, floors, toilet areas, workstations, and the length of your shift. This is the single most useful number on the page.
• Attendance. Shifts missed, years without a no-show, extra shifts covered. Supervisors staff routes around who turns up.
• Trust. Keys, alarm codes, access passes, key-holding, working alone out of hours. Say if you have held them and for how long.
• Equipment. Scrubber dryer, burnisher, carpet extractor, backpack vacuum, rotary floor machine. Machine experience moves you up the pay scale.
• Safety. Chemical dilution, COSHH and safety data sheets, wet floor signs, body fluid spill clean-ups. One sentence here shows you will not cause an incident.
• Availability. Evenings, early mornings, weekends and bank holiday cover. Most office cleaning happens after the building empties.

“Tell me the floor area and the shift length, and I know straight away whether you can handle my route. After that, attendance. I would rather have a cleaner with average technique who never misses a night than a perfectionist who calls in sick twice a month, because the client only notices when nobody came.”

The standard office cleaner job description is a list: empty bins, hoover, clean toilets, dust surfaces. Copying it tells a supervisor nothing about you. Add the count, the area or the result.

Two or three lines at the top. Years of cleaning, shift type, area covered, one reliability fact. Use a career objective instead if this is your first cleaning job.

Split them into the tasks, the machines and the safety knowledge. The machines are what move you up the pay scale, so do not bury them.

• Daily tasks: washroom cleaning, disinfection and restocking, general waste and recycling, hoovering, dusting and high-level dusting, glass and partition cleaning, high-touch point disinfection, staff kitchen cleaning, meeting room resets
• Machines: scrubber dryer, rotary floor machine and burnisher, carpet extractor, backpack and upright vacuum, wet vac, pressure washer, scissor lift for high-level dusting where you hold the training (IPAF)
• Floor care: strip and reseal, mop and bucket technique, dust control mopping, grout cleaning, entrance matting, carpet spot treatment
• Safety and compliance: chemical dilution from labelled dispensers, COSHH and safety data sheets, personal protective equipment, wet floor signage, body fluid spill procedure, safe ladder use, setting and unsetting the intruder alarm
• Building trust: keys, access passes and alarm codes, key-holding, working alone out of hours, respecting confidential paperwork left on desks, reporting maintenance faults
• Practical extras: supply stock checks and reordering, covering for colleagues, training new cleaners, English and Spanish, a driving licence for multi-site routes

Leave off 'hard-working' and 'good attitude'. Attendance numbers and audit scores say the same thing and cannot be argued with.

Cleaning is one of the easiest fields to enter with no formal experience, because the training is short and the staff shortage is real. What the company needs to believe is that you will turn up, work unsupervised and not break anything.

1. 1Lead with availability. Evenings, early mornings, weekends. Being free from 6 pm is worth more than a polished CV.
2. 2Say you can work alone. Many routes are one cleaner in an empty building, and not everyone is comfortable with that.
3. 3Use any job that proves attendance and physical work: warehouse, kitchen, landscaping, shelf stacking, farm work, care work. Give the absence count.
4. 4Count your home or family cleaning honestly if that is all you have, and describe the scale: a four-bedroom house, weekly deep cleans, an elderly relative's flat.
5. 5List any equipment you have used, even a household vacuum, a pressure washer or a floor machine from another job.
6. 6Mention transport: your own car, a driving licence, or a night bus that runs at your shift time. Supervisors worry about how you get home at 2 am.
7. 7Say you are willing to take safety training on day one. Short COSHH awareness and infection control courses are available online at low cost if you want to arrive with something.

No licence is required to clean an office in the UK. A few short courses do make a difference on the page, because they cut the company's induction time and their insurance risk.

• IOSH Working Safely. A one-day health and safety course recognised across UK workplaces and often paid for by the employer.
• Body fluid spill and infection control training. Expected before anyone cleans toilets or deals with a first aid spill.
• COSHH awareness, which covers chemical labels, safety data sheets, dilution and personal protective equipment. Your employer must train you on the products you use; list it if you have done it.
• British Institute of Cleaning Science (BICSc) training, such as the Cleaning Operator's Proficiency Certificate (COPC), recognised across the contract cleaning industry.
• Infection prevention and control training for clinics, GP surgeries and labs, plus knowledge of the NHS National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness 2021 if you clean healthcare sites.
• Machine training from your employer on scrubber dryers, access equipment or pressure washers. Name the machine, not just the word 'training'.
• A full UK driving licence with no or few points if the route covers more than one building.

One page, plain layout, no photo, no columns. Large contract cleaning companies use applicant tracking software that reads plain text, and small companies print the page and take it to the supervisor.

• Mirror the advert's words: 'cleaning operative', 'contract cleaning', 'day porter', 'evening cleaner', 'night shift', 'communal areas', 'washrooms', 'floor care', 'scrubber dryer', 'key-holder'.
• Put your shift availability in the top block, because the job usually exists because of a shift nobody wants.
• Give a mobile number you answer and keep the voicemail box empty. Cleaning companies call; they rarely email.
• Use month and year dates and explain gaps in a few words rather than leaving them blank.
• If you speak more than one language, say so. Supervisors often need someone who can pass instructions to a mixed team.

Last check: could a supervisor read the first five lines and know your shift, your area and whether you turn up? If not, that information is too far down the page.