When you attend an interview for a job, most recruiters are looking to assess you in 3 core areas

• Your skills

• Your attributes

• Your experience

A SKILL is the ability to do something well

An ATTRIBUTE is a quality or feature regarded as a characteristic or inherent part of someone

EXPERIENCE is having gained knowledge or skill in a particular field over time

As a commercial cleaner, your skills will be your ability to clean different surfaces well, your attributes will be your ability to see where something needs cleaning and your experience will be the knowledge you have gained so you know what type of surface needs what time of product or cleaning style to produce the desired outcome.

A great way to show your skills, attributes and experiences are to have examples of where you have demonstrated them in a work environment.

Would you like a copy of some interview questions to help you prepare? Click here to get a copy of the sample interview questions.

It’s okay if you don’t have an example or experience; if you get asked a question and you haven’t experienced that scenario then you can talk through how you would handle the situation in the event it happened to you in a future work situation. 

You could say “That is not a situation I have experienced, this is what I would do if I was in that situation …… “

It’s okay if you don’t know; it is better to say you don’t know than to try and make something up in an interview. You can say “ I’m not sure what I would do in that situation”

Transferable skills

Transferable skills can be described as skills or expertise you have developed in one area of a job role that can be used in a different job role.

For example, you may have experience cleaning hotel rooms. From this experience, you have developed the skills to work efficiently, in a team, polish mirrors, vacuum, dust, clean bathrooms and clean inside windows.

All those skills can also be used to clean an office

So the skills you developed cleaning hotel rooms are transferable to cleaning an office workspace.

Use examples of when you cleaned hotel rooms to show you have the capability to clean other environments.