Nanny Employer Blog

     A trend that we have seen recently has been for two families to pool resources and share a nanny for their combined children. Not only does this significantly reduce the amount that each family pays, but it can be a great avenue for children to play and socialize with others outside of their immediate family. I have touched on this issue in previous blogs in reference to long-term options and advocated that families consider this when determining the solution that best fits their in-home childcare needs.

     However, lately, we have been experiencing this same trend among temporary client families who call in for a need that is brief in duration, and can even be last-minute. Families may forget to mention in advance that there will be children present in the home that do not belong to the client family or commonly, neighborhood kids may wander over to the home for a spontaneous play date. We want to make sure that we are doing a good job of locating a suitable caregiver based upon the information provided so that she is prepared to handle the number of children and particular ages present at any given job. In order to do this, we need to make sure that we are notified in advance of the addition of more children needing supervision.

     We can usually accommodate these needs but our caregivers may be thrown for a loop if unprepared. It is also critical that the family lets both the agency and caregiver know who can or cannot come over to the home while parents are away (eg. neighborhood kids). As a reminder, in order to prevent complicated billing, any additional children that will be cared for at any point in time within the job assignment will incur an additional $1 per hour charge for the job’s entirety, even if the extra child is only there a portion of the total time.

     As a reminder, per the contract that you signed with MBF, the other family may not call the MBF caregiver directly to book her to watch their children without going through the agency (this is referred to as an “indirect referral” by you). Your caregiver has also signed an agreement committing to redirect these inquiries to MBF. Thank you for helping us to enforce these agreements without which we could not remain in business.

     Our sitters love your kids and want to make sure we can always over deliver on our attentiveness and care for your little ones, so please make sure to let your placement counselor know of any additions the next time you book a job!

Hiring a nanny can be a daunting process and, for many, the idea of bringing someone new into their home and leaving their kids in the sole care of someone they don’t know can be scary. It’s very important to identify each step needed to carefully navigate this search, the end result of which yields comfort and peace of mind. Whether using an agency or not, this same 10 step process will help you gain a better understanding of how to approach hiring a professional and loving caregiver who is the right match for your family and your unique needs and expectations.

1. Determine your needs: map out the criteria most important to you, from personality to special skills, hours and schedule, salary/package, age experience, education, training, childcare and discipline philosophy, responsibilities, etc.
2. Write a job description: put your thoughts down on paper and spell them out in a one page summary that you can share with an agency and/or potential candidates. This will be the framework of your future employment agreement and a conversational piece for an interview.
3. Register with an agency or post your job: turning over your search to a reputable and experienced agency will allow you to greatly minimize your time and effort in the remaining steps. However, if you are a do-it-yourselfer, you can write a short blurb with the key points in your job description and post it online or in the paper, but be prepared for a flood of unqualified applicants you may have to weed through in order to move on to the next step(s). If your needs are time sensitive or you are very busy, this may not be an option for you.
4. Screen applicants/conduct phone interviews: make sure to screen for the most important criteria (hours, salary, age experience, responsibilities willing to perform, area of town) before moving on to any more detailed probing (an agency will already have done this for you). Above and beyond having the right experience on paper, you will want to have enough chemistry on the phone to warrant an in-person meeting. A good fit is a combination of both!
5. In-person interview: arrange for promising candidates to come to your home to meet with you and get a preview of the potential future work environment. You may want to meet without the children in case it is not a good fit, or bring the kids in for part of the interview to observe the interaction. This initial meeting mainly serves to feel out compatibility (assuming the main needs will be able to be met by this person); a good candidate should interview you too!
6. Trial time/working interview: observing someone while working will give you the best indicator of future performance. Trial time is typically 3-5 days for local non live-in candidates. Try to duplicate the duties, hours, etc. as closely as possible so that the candidate can experience the job as accurately as possible (ex. morning traffic patterns) before moving forward. This time should serve as reinforcement for your decision or bring up possible red flags to halt you from moving forward. A good agency will provide a guarantee period (typically 90 days) in which you can get a free replacement.
7. Reference/background checks: when deciding between two great candidates, a reference check can be the tie breaker. An agency will already have checked references prior to sending you a profile. However, after you have interviewed with a certain candidate, you may have specific questions that are generated that a former employer can specifically address, above and beyond verifying simply whether or not they are qualified for the job. Background checks are essential for peace of mind and the security of your children. Individual families may not know how to conduct these checks themselves or where to go to obtain the most comprehensive and up-to-date information. An experienced agency can assist and can provide ongoing monitoring services as well.
8. Job offer/employment agreement: an extensive written agreement is the key to a long-term relationship where expectations are clear and misunderstandings minimized. An agency may provide a template for you that addresses the most typical scenarios in question in a comprehensive way. The job offer should come in the form of this written proposal with an expectation for some negotiation back and forth to ultimately arrive at a clearly spelled out and mutually beneficial , agreed upon working arrangement. An agency can act as the middle man in cases where negotiating directly is uncomfortable or an awkward way to kick off the new relationship.
9. Job begins: the employment agreement is signed and a start date is set!
10. Post-hire relationship maintenance/job satisfaction: the greatest way to ensure success is to set up regularly scheduled one-on-ones to discuss the job and what is working well and what is not. Providing an open forum for communication and discussion of struggles, obstacles and accomplishments as well (recommended at least monthly) will ensure the long lasting satisfaction of both parties involved. Semi-annual reviews and annual opportunities for bonuses and raises will also demonstrate the perceived value of the performance and relationship.

Good luck in hiring a great nanny! We would love to assist you in this important process with our years of experience and expertise!

The International Nanny Association just released its 2009 Salary and Benefits Survey based on 2008. 667 in-home childcare providers responded to the survey. 86.6% identified themselves exclusively as a nanny, while others were temp nannies, travelling nannies, involved in a nanny share, newborn care specialists, doulas, governesses, etc.

Almost 30% reported completing a Bachelor’s degree, 36% completed some college, and almost 20% completed high school only. The majority are live-out (85%), while 13% are live-in. About 25% have 5-10 years experience, 20% have 10-15 years of experience, and 11% had 15-20 years of experience. Most care for 2 children (46%), ages 3-5 (41%).

Of these professionals, 46% reported using an agency to find their current position.

Salaries are all over the board, typically ranging from $300-1000 per week (pre-tax). About two-thirds report employers withholding federal and state taxes, while about 27% do not withhold taxes. About 24% get paid $15 per hour for hourly babysitting, while 19% get paid $20 per hour, and almost 30% get paid between $10-12 per hour. Full-time live out nannies in Texas earn on average $12.54 per hour.

About 45% of live-out nannies are paid between $50-100 for an overnight, while another 15% receive no additional compensation and 25% report receiving other types of compensation. Most did not receive additional compensation when (and if) they travelled with the family. 74% are paid their normal compensation if the employer doesn’t need them to work and they have the time off. About 18% received the equivalent of one week’s pay as a year end bonus. Many others received bonuses or gifts as well of a different equivalent. However, over 80% of employers did not report their end of year gift as taxed!

About two-thirds receive paid national and religious holidays and paid sick days. 47% report receiving 2 weeks paid vacation (26% receive more vacation), 20% get paid personal days. 17% get their health insurance completely paid for, while 12% get half paid by their employer. 34% get reimbursement for use of their own vehicle, while 34% are provided a vehicle to use by their employer. Others get additional reimbursements like health club memberships, travel, conference fees, retirement plans, association dues, college education contributions, disability insurance, and clothing allowance.

About two-thirds work for a professional couple, 12% work for a family where at least one parent works from home, and 11% work for parents where one is a professional and the other is at home.

We, at Mom’s Best Friend, try and attract the highest caliber caregivers, and thus want to help equip our client families with information so that they can then put together an appealing package that is in line with the current market.

If you would like a copy of the entire survey and results, please feel free to email me at kathy.dupuy@mbfagency.com.

Believe it or not, summer is just around the corner! You probably want to get through one week of Spring Break first before starting to mull over visions of kids at home and how to entertain them for 3 months! Beginning in April, we start to get an influx of wonderful caregivers whose aim and talent is to do just that! Many are teachers who need a summer job or students home from college who are looking for the right opportunity to spend their sunny days creating memories with your little ones.

If you’re like me, you start clipping out and saving ads for camps that look like they might pique the interest of your kids and keep them active for at least a portion of their day. Many people don’t think of hiring a nanny as your own personal entertainment director! There are so many local activities that we don’t have time to take advantage of during the busy school year and can use summer as a chance to be a tourist in our own backyard with our very own “staycations”. Kids also enjoy the chance to have a voice in what they would like to do and the flexibility to be spontaneous and not “locked in” to a certain activity on a certain day.

The advantage of hiring someone with an educational background is the opportunity to use summer as a teaching or learning enhancement time. Whether it be a budding reader needing phonics practice or an older child fascinated with the everyday miracles of Mother Nature, they can enjoy the luxury afforded by a less harried pace, enabling exploration and expansion of their personal knowledge base.

At Mom’s Best Friend, we want to help make this opportunity more affordable for families struggling with the current economy and have thus lowered our placement fee to a flat $900 (usually the equivalent of $100 per week) for the entire summer. We hope that you will take advantage of this great offer and our growing base of fantastic, highly qualified candidates to start the process of finding your wonderful MBF summer nanny!

While we are experiencing some negative impacts of the economy, there are also some great positive benefits our client families can take advantage of right now! One tremendous benefit is the increased nanny pool. We are seeing an influx of extremely qualified caregivers who are seeking immediate employment. At Mom’s Best Friend, we pride ourselves on the quality of our candidates and the thoroughness of our background screening. In previous years, we have had to do extra recruiting to find those fantastic candidates. Today, that is not the case. A number of experienced, veteran nannies that may have lost their job due to one parent deciding to stay home or losing their job are now on the job market. What a wonderful time to find a supernanny!

Our nannies all appreciate the opportunity to work and the ability to make a difference in the lives of the children and parents they work for. These individuals have a heart for service and a desire to walk side by side with their employer to help ease some of the additional stress they themselves are feeling by competently and lovingly caring for their children (and home). In addition to childcare, nannies often take on some of the household management and coordination. Because of the contracting job market, we are seeing nannies becoming more flexible in regards to hours, duties and compensation than ever before.

My nanny is a superstar and handles such extra tasks as: arranging for and supervising household repairs, household organization, creating a weekly Excel spreadsheet/schedule for the family, grocery shopping and meal planning, some cooking, errands, cataloguing family photos, decorating for the holidays, taking the cars for maintenance, helping with the kids’ schooling (she’s a teacher!), packing, travelling with us, and so much more.

Let one of our many Mom’s Best Friend Super Nannies help make your home life easier!

I recently had the opportunity to visit our new Vail office.  We are thrilled to be able to offer services to existing and new clients who may vacation or own a second home in the Vail/Beaver Creek/Bachelor Gulch/Arrowhead/Eagle part of Colorado.

My family loves to vacation there and we experienced our first Thanksgiving with all 4 of our kids in ski school!  Our youngest, 3 year old twins, were finally potty trained and anxious to hit the slopes!  They got as far as the “Magic Carpet” where they rode up a motorized flat escalator of sorts and were able to “ski” a few feet down with the help of a wonderful (and very patient) ski instructor, making “pizzas” (wedges) and avoiding the alligator alleys (translate “trees”).  We are all anxious to head back up again on Christmas Day for some more practice.  Even though I have a wonderful nanny who lives with us and will be travelling with us to Colorado, I’m sure that I will avail myself of our services there so that I can give my much-loved and hard-working nanny a chance to ski herself!
 
We are so thrilled to have partnered with Jill Smirl, our franchisee in Vail,  to open a much-needed office in that area.  Jill is a mother of 3, knows everyone in the Vail Valley, and is an awesome realtionship builder with a passion for quality and customer service, so she is a great fit for MBF!  She also purchased a local operation, Vail Sitters, and has incorporated their client base into Mom’s Best Friend Vail/Beaver Creek.  We offer a wide range of services in this market, some of which differ from other markets, including ski companions, property managers, and more.  If you are a current member in any of our cities, keep in mind that your membership is good in Vail as well.  A membership is so versatile, since it can be used in any city for a wide range of services, and makes a great Christmas gift so keep this in mind for a stocking stuffer.  If you’re planning a white Christmas in Vail, don’t forget to make MBF part of your plans!

Last week, I attended the Alliance of Premier Nanny Agencies conference in Las Vegas, along with 100 of my colleagues who own and work for professional nanny agencies all over the country. We enjoyed a great time of collaboration and idea generation. On Friday, Lisa Vines (VP of Sales Operations) and I spoke to the group about how to enhance your on-call (sitter) services. We shared ideas about how to exceed client expectations, reward your nannies, and provide corporate backup child care (as we do for many Texas businesses). I am also proud to say that we were recognized as a top 3 nominee for Nanny Agency of the Year at an award dinner on Saturday evening.

Attendance at events like this conference help us to stay on top of the latest background checks, providing top notch customer service, and general ways to improve our offerings to our valued, loyal client families. Belonging to one or both industry associations (the other being the International Nanny Association) signifies an adherence to stringent industry standards, ethics and expectations in the running of your business. Mom’s Best Friend has been a member of both associations for many years and helped with planning conferences, speaking at conferences as an industry expert, and working on various committees to help make improvements.

You may be aware that the CBS program, The Early Show, is running a week long series on nannies. The broadcast has made the common mistake of implying that online-only job sites provide the same level of service as professional agencies.

The Alliance for Professional Nanny Agencies has provided some of the following information to help parents understand and differentiate between an online nanny database and a full-service nanny placement firm (like Mom’s Best Friend).

A Sittercity spokesperson was interviewed in one segment. Sittercity connects families and nannies online and rarely screens either. Job listing services such as Sittercity should not be confused with full-service nanny agencies.

Online job listing services can give the client a false sense of security. Many online services steer parents to low-cost, computer background checks that offer minimal screening compared to what a top-notch nanny agency would consider adequate. Sittercity connects parents to the LexisNexis background check that costs $9.99. Sittercity’s own web site has a disclaimer that the LexisNexis check covers just 38 states (http://www.sittercity.com/help_detail.html?tag=bgcin). Some online job listing services call the LexisNexis check “nationwide” which can be misleading.

Top notch household staffing agencies require a computer background check, and much more, on each job candidate. Most quality agencies hire a seasoned professional to conduct background checks. You can read in detail about what a thorough background check entails on our web site at: http://theapna.org/blog. We, at Mom’s Best Friend, use a company that provides the most comprehensive background check available at this time, as well as ongoing monthly monitoring for the lifetime of the placement.

Quality nanny agencies also meet each nanny candidate in person and check the candidate’s references and resume. Online job listing services most often do not check qualifications or references. They simply advise parents to perform those tasks.

Careful, experienced household staffing agencies are the best way to protect children, but they also help ensure a job seeker’s safety. Katherine Olson of Minnesota was found dead last October, one day after she responded to an online ad for a nanny job. The 19-year-old man police suspect placed the ad, where he posed as a parent seeking a nanny, is charged with her murder and awaiting trial.

A responsible staffing agency knows when one of its job candidates is being interviewed, and the candidate is expected to report in afterward. The personal contact that a qualified agency provides is an added security measure for both candidates and the hiring families. That service also increases the chances a family will find a nanny that is right for them and decreases the chances of high turnover of nannies in their employment.

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By now, you have hopefully survived the first week of school and have begun to get into a good fall routine. After numerous trips for school supplies, uniforms, and books, and meetings with new teachers, you and your kids can now relax a bit and settle into your new schedule.

For our family, it is always the chance for a new start, a blank slate and we spend a lot of time talking to our eldest 2 daughters about what to expect in this new school grade, how to make the most of their education, how to make friends (and keep them!), first impressions with new teachers, and outlining our expectations of them so that we can all have a great year! It’s of even greater significance for our family to go through this exercise since mom and dad are the teachers too (we home school two of our children 2 days a week as part of the University Model School model school they attend).

One of the biggest challenges we personally face is in getting our 6th grader to take ownership of her school work. We want her to take pride in completing her assignments to the best of her ability and turning them in on time. Our school has a low tolerance for work turned in past the deadline and really wants to help teach kids early on the importance of meeting deadlines so that later on into adulthood, when it’s an important presentation for work, the sense of responsibility and self management has already been long established. For some great homework tips for parents, check out: http://www.newsforparents.org/expert_motivate_kids_homework.html.

Our live-in nanny/home educator, Katie, is a tremendous asset in assisting with our childrens’ learning and development. She made a trip to Teacher Heaven to update our home classroom with colorful bulletin boards and teaching tools, ordered all of our new books and uniforms, and helped get our dedicated space and “students” ready for a new school year! We recently decided that we would set aside time each week for a “book club” where she and I will read relevant books on raising children and discuss ways that we can implement some of the things we are both learning when working with the kids together so we are always on the same page and present a united front! Our first choice is “The Magic of Love & Logic” and I am already very excited about some of the great takeaways from this first read.

At Mom’s Best Friend, we want to support you during this sometimes stressful transition with all the tools and resources you and your family need! Let us know if we can help in any way.

You might have seen one of the two news segments this last week featuring Mom’s Best Friend and our background checks partner, CSIdentity. View Fox segment | View CBS segment

We are very excited to roll out this new program for our clients which will incorporate the most comprehensive checks now available. We believe that we are the first in our industry to introduce this type of check into the screening process, thus guaranteeing our client families tremendous peace of mind.

This new firm we have partnered with, CSIdentity, searches more than 350 million unique identity records for criminal histories, which accounts for 70 million criminal identities in its database versus the FBI which has 55 million. New to our screening are two added features now possible through CSIentity:

• Identity Authentication: validating the identity of each candidate through a series of questions that only that candidate would be able to accurately answer
• Ongoing Monitoring: monthly monitoring that continues to ensure the candidate maintains a clear criminal background.

This last feature is at no additional cost to our clients and continues for the entire duration of employment between the client and caregiver. We are so pleased to be able to offer this unique and exhaustive background checks package to our valued clients.

Mom’s Best Friend has been active in helping to create standards for our industry through the International Nanny Association (www.nanny.org) and The Alliance for Premier Nanny Agencies (www.theapna.com) in the realm of background checks so that there is consistency across the country in this arena, thereby protecting families and children from substandard screening. Let us know what you think about our new offerings!