Nick Gerakines

With Vanessa’s grandmother moving to another state, Carolyn and I started looking for babysitter for Vanessa with sittercity.com. I’m not sure where she heard about it, but I’m leaning toward believing that it was from another website or blog.

After looking through it briefly, we signed up at the annual membership level ($95.88 USD per year) and posted a job. We weren’t really looking for a full time nanny or daily babysitting, but rather someone to watch Vanessa for a few hours either once a week or every other week. Really, Carolyn and I want to get out a bit more now that Vanessa is getting older. For those of you that know me, I really miss going to the movies with her.

Browsing and searching for babysitters on sittercity.com easy. Childcare provides have profiles that lists a bio, their schedule, reviews, information on who they are and where they are from as well as any related skills. When you join, you can specify your zip code and all of the profile searching and browsing is centered on that location. In addition, if you need a childcare provider then you post a “job” and the babysitters are notified via email.

Posting a job is rather simple. The usual title, description, location and rate fields are given and then it goes into the details of when and how often the work lasts and continues to. It also goes into the childcare details like how many children, their age(s) and whatever requirements you may have for the caretaker.

We had tentatively decided beforehand what was going to disqualify people immediately. The criteria used to reject applicants included:

• Schedule conflicts or unideal availability.
• Already having a full-time nanny job.
• The ability to compose full sentences and use correct grammar when communicating.

The job was actually posted on a Monday night and by morning, we had over 30 applications for it. I was blown away. For the next few days the number climbed to over 50 and by then we were already making plans on interviewing some of them. By the following Saturday, we had the list filtered down to 10 or so babysitters that we wanted to meet and introduce to Vanessa. We chose to meet at a nearby park, a nice neutral location, and setup 30-45 minute windows for each of them.

Some of them couldn’t make it that so we ended up with 8 people planned. Also, one of them canceled at the last minute so that that took us down to a reasonable 7. Still, we had a pretty full day of interviews. Carolyn and I had a list of questions and a good idea of what we wanted to learn about them. What I wasn’t prepared for was how many of them flaked out and just plain didn’t show up at all. Only 3 of the 7 people we were expecting actually came. Carolyn and I were puzzled. It’s worth saying that the people who didn’t show up had, at some point, actually confirmed the time and location. These people acknowledged the time and place but just didn’t go. It may be needless to say that those who flaked out did not get rescheduled or contacted again.

For the three that did show up, the interviews weren’t bad. One of them is a definite and is starting next week. Another seems like a good fit and we will keep on call as a backup. The third we didn’t feel strongly for. Mainly because she didn’t engage Vanessa and her transportation situation sounded a bit flaky.

The two that we have are only available for the summer and are off to school in the Fall. That means that we’ll have to do another babysitter search in September/October, but that’s not so bad. We have a good idea of what to look for when we go through the next round.

In the end, I’m really happy with sittercity.com and we found a babysitter through it fairly quickly with lots and lots of options. I’m really glad that we signed up and I recommend it. There were some hickups but it wasn’t with the site itself. And the best news is that next week, I’ll finally get to see Star Trek.