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Finding a Reliable Babysitter for Your Kids

Trusting someone with your kids is hard enough, and finding a reliable candidate for babysitting is even more challenging. We have some tips that will help you find sitters to interview, as well as some questions to ask before hiring them.

Sort out your needs

On the face of it, this one seems simple: you just need someone who will make sure your kids are alive and well while you’re away.  But there’s a lot more to choosing a sitter than that— like how often do you need them? Do they need special skills and education? To narrow down the applicants, try writing out what do you exactly want in a babysitter.

These are the main things to consider:

  • Potential duties. Will they be cooking for your children, or tutoring them, or picking them up after classes? Will they require a driver’s license, a skill to handle your pets, a degree in education? Make a list of your requirements, and rank them to sort out the ones that are necessary.
  • Availability. Think about how often you’ll need the babysitter: daily? Weekly? You should also consider how many hours you’ll need them. If your schedules don’t match, it will never work. You should know if you can get a sitter on short notice, just in case.
  • Cost. When it comes to family matters, much boils down to budgeting. Finding a great babysitter is vital, but what if they are out of your limits, Witch childcare being so expensive, you should know your price range to eliminate the ones out of your reach.
  • Safety & Work experience. What work experience and past clients would be convincing to you? Would you run a background check? A standard background check will cover social security number verification, a search of the National Criminal Database, and State Sex Offender Registry. It is particularly important if you didn’t know the person before hiring them.
This list will also help you develop the interview questions for a prospective candidate.

Spot the best possible sitter

Once you’ve found a few, you’ll want to interview them to see who’s the best fit for your family’s needs. During the interview (and after), look for these signs that a sitter would be a good hire:

Find real references.  It’s your child’s safety we’re talking about — so it’s okay to dig deep. So don’t just ask for references: consider contacting their past employers to learn more about their experience with this sitter.

Check their qualifications. Do they have First aid/CPR training? Do they display maturity, literacy, and common sense? You would probably want your sitter to be organized, responsible, but at the same time communicative and fun - and, on top of that, without bad habits.

Trust your gut. Well beyond any qualifications, it’s important to take your hunch into account. Try asking yourself a simple question: would you trust this person with your child? So much of it just comes down to personality. While background-check services and platforms do their own personality tests, it is always up to you, the parent, to decide if you vibe with the person.

 

Evaluate the sitter

These simple steps will help you make a verdict about if you’d like to hire this particular babysitter for more gigs.

Check on your sitter. Be sure to call back home, especially if you are not easily accessible. Not only will it make you less worry less about your kid’s wellbeing, but it can also help if a sitter runs into some unexpected issues.

Get a debriefing. Request feedback when you get home. Ask specifically about areas where you think the sitter may have had trouble.

Ask your kids about the sitter. If your children are old enough to speak, you may get a good sense of the sitter based on their words. Did they have fun? Was there something peculiar about the sitter’s behavior? How exactly did they spend time? These pointers will help you evaluate the sitter’s competence.

 

We hope that you manage to find the best sitter ever via Humans Network! Following these easy steps will help you choose the best provider fitting in our global human resource bank!