How to Interview a Babysitter?
Leaving your baby or child with someone new for the first time can be an anxiety-inducing time. However, with the right preparations in place, this needn’t be the case. One way of doing this is by interviewing prospective babysitters. At Sitters we pre-qualify and vet all of our registered babysitters in advance, so that you don’t have to. We take all potential babysitters through a three-step process of information gathering, interviewing, and reference checking. But do you know what questions we ask? Do you know how to interview a babysitter?
What We’re Looking For
Before we even start on how to interview a babysitter, we are clear about what we’re looking for. Working with parents like yourself for many years we have an excellent understanding of what you want and need to know. Therefore, we work backwards from there and have formulated our interview questions based on this. Typically, a Sitters babysitter works, or has worked, in other childcare roles such as nanny, teacher or nursery nurse, and will have at least two years’ experience behind them.
The Interview
Our interviews for babysitters are carried out by experienced and dedicated Sitters professionals. It’s a stringent and fair process, and not everyone passes the interview stage. We are dedicated to ensuring you only get the best and most suitable babysitters through us to give you the peace of mind that you need in order to comfortably leave your child in the babysitter’s care.
The babysitter interview is broken down in to a few different parts. We typically use it to qualify any questions coming from the application form, or for further expansion or clarification of certain points.
The purpose of some questions is to ascertain and set expectations. For example, when choosing a babysitter through Sitters, you always pay the fair and reasonable regional rate. This is not set by the babysitter. Therefore, at interview, expectations regarding pay are set out.
Importantly, we use the interview stage as an opportunity to find out more about the potential babysitter’s childcare experience. This will likely include information about the nature of the roles, the ages of the children they have cared for, as well as things such as what they like and don’t like about childcare. The answers to these questions all help to paint a picture of what the individual will be like, caring for your child.
We also tend to ask what challenges they have faced in their childcare roles. This helps us to get a good feeling of how they will respond should there be an emergency with your child. Whilst emergencies during babysitting are extremely rare, we want to make sure that you have confidence that your Sitters babysitter can handle any situation which presents itself.
Finally, the interview is used to discuss how we may contact referees, as we always ensure we have a minimum of two relevant references per babysitter. In many ways, the reference check is an extension of the interview. Here we check that the interview questions tally with the statements given in the reference.
What Else in Addition to an Interview?
The interview stage is crucial in our decision whether to register a new babysitter with us. However, it works in conjunction with our other detailed stages. These include a detailed application form, proof of relevant experience, reference checks, photo ID and proof of address. Furthermore, we insist that all babysitters new to Sitters agree to our Code of Conduct and Terms and Conditions.
As you can see, interviewing a potential babysitter can be a time consuming and complex task. We strive to remove the concern of how to interview a babysitter from you so that you can simply rest assured that all Sitters babysitters are suitable, without any shadow of a doubt.
To book an interviewed and reference checked babysitter through us, click here .
We believe your little ones deserve the very best care. That's why our local network of babysitters are personally checked and picked by our family for your family www.sitters.co.uk.
