Looking for Childcare: My Experience with Nanny Search Sites

I recently found myself in the position of looking for a nanny   for my son. While I reached out to my local mother’s club, I wasn’t really able to get a good recommendation for a nanny so I turned to the web to search for a nanny. I visited several sites for my search.

Traffic:

Search Capabliities

Summary:
I found that Care.com was the easiest to use and my job post garnered the most applicants, probably because it is highly trafficked and has more visitors than all the other sites by far (see stats above). I liked the My Care.com interface, and it is the only site that allowed me to refine my search based on a schedule. This is very important and useful feature because often a candidate ends up being eliminated based on the schedule not being a good fit. For a 1-month search, this was the more affordable option.

Care.com also has this nice feature where Care.com checks out the references and the post the recording for you to listen to. That was pretty neat and a nice feature for care providers’ profile.

Sittercity.com is also a good option and its search uses a filter method instead. You search by zip code first, and then select your filters. Each filter has a number next to it, showing you the number of candidates that choosing that filter will refine your results to. I think it is the most useful if you are looking for special care as it has an extensive list of special needs to select from. he one-month usage cost is higher because of the $39.99 set up fee.

The references, if the provided listed it, has contact info right on the profile, whereas Care.com does not show the reference contact info. My job posting did not get quite as many responses compared to Care.com, and while there are some overlaps in terms of the candidates on the sites, but there is enough new candidates that I thought it was worth a look.

Nannies4hire.com was easy to use, and it was also the most expensive. They got a lot of fodder from Dr. Phil so I took a look at it. The feature that sets it apart is the more detailed background check, but the detailed background check is really not available unless you pay for the 99-day plan, which was $199 (which I did not want to pay for) ! I wished that I was able to choose a plan that was 30 days with the detailed background check but that is not an option. They also did not have a free trial, which I did not like. I was able to get get a coupon from doing an internet search and chose their most basic 30-day plan.

I thought it was interesting that they are the only one of the 5 sites that has height and weight information in their care provider profiles. Their customer service people were nice and I had no trouble reaching a rep and didn’t have to wait at all. I called them to complain about their lack of candidates in my area and they tweaked my profile a bit to help me get some more responses and gave me a few pointers as well.

I heard about Enannysource.com from my local mother’s club but I didn’t even bother subscribing at all because my free trial search yielded only 20 candidates within 25 miles of where I live, and many of them have not logged in within the last month. That’s the thing about these sites, a lot of times you won’t find too many people who have logged in recently for it to even be worth your while to pay for a subscription.

Sitters.com looks a lot like a lesser featured Care.com. I also did not subscribe to this site beyond the 7-day trial because it did not seem to have enough recently logged in candidates for me. The reason that the recently logged in candidates is important is because it means that people who are not recently logged in are not likely to be actively looking and available. Sitters.com does feature an “All Mom Editorial Team” that vets all the profiles submitted on their site.