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My husband, myself and my two boys, 18 months and 3 weeks, recently moved to head of the harbor in Saint James and are in need of a full time nanny. I will be going back to work in about 6 weeks and am just starting to look for someone. We are a very private upper class family who have very demanding jobs and i just want to know my boys are safe and taken care of.
I have heard of care.com and sittercity, and had one good experience and one bad experience when my first son was born, so i really wanted to try out a nanny agency this time around. I was hoping someone on here could recommend a few?
I would also suggest you start looking at o pairs because it seems like you're looking for a live in. A few words of advice form friends that have opairs.
1. Do not get one from an European country. (they hate America and are sometimes cold)
2. Do not get one that's too young she may be thinking of coming to America to party especially being in the NY area.
3. Don't trust the background check from the site or recruiter. If they've been in this country for some time and are coming from another family it's because it did not work out with that family.
4. Your best bets for finding a good nanny is a South Asian country or a Latin American country.
We were in the same situation earlier this year. Almost ALL of the high-end agencies scour the 2 sites you listed (Care & SC) to find many people to fill their high quality nanny pool. Save the $5-10k, and the aggravation of dealing with the agencies and use the online sites. We found one through care.com recently. It took about 6-7 weeks and we met with at least 7 or 8 candidates before we hired our current nanny, but there is not one agency we used that was worth the ridiculous fee they charge, or offered more than a handful of almost good enough candidates. Admittedly, we're pretty picky and when you don't settle for what the agency sends you, they stop sending you candidates after 2-3 and then they stop returning your calls/emails. And these were the highest end agencies in NYC and on LI. We made it easy for the agencies, too - we sent every agency we worked with a very specific requirement list of skills/personality traits/language skills (understandable English) we needed the right candidate to possess, and the agencies never sent us a candidate that had more than 75% of what we were looking for. BTW - you can use agencies and the online sites at the same time to get there quicker but every quality person we talked to from Care or SC told us they were working with agencies that found their profile online.
Using basic common sense online safety, my wife used a fake first name on the online sites, never gave out our address, talked with each candidate initially on the phone and then met them at a diner close to our house and then brought them back to our house to meet our child if we felt comfortable when we met in person. Not sure about SC but I know Care.com has background check and reference features that are helpful, and I also required a photocopy of their drivers license/passport/green card and social security number if we got past the first in home meeting to run a criminal check, which several online sites to do in 5 minutes for $20 (we had to use someone legal because we needed a person with a NYS drivers license and you have to be legal to get one in this state). Also, before the person starts I would also make them sign a release to do a credit check, which also can be done online very easily. Remember: people who have nothing to hide will willingly give you whatever you need. After all, you're bringing a stranger into your home and trusting them with your most valuable assets.
And if you need someone that drives like we did, make sure you do a road test. No joke. We LOVED this one young woman from Haiti and were all ready to make her an offer right on the spot because our child is shy and they got along famously after 5 minutes playing together, but when i took her on a little drive, she hit a huge mound of snow (in March) when making a normal turn into a parking lot and could barely keep the car between the lines.
We worked as hard on this as you would finding a job. We networked with EVERYONE to find a good nanny. If your 18 month old goes to any Mommy & me, gym, music classes, etc, ask everyone for a reference. Ask nannies of your friends' kids (I'm convinced there's a secret nanny cabal in that they all know each other). We even asked waiters in restaurants around our area that we frequent because you never know when a couple will come in one night and be distraught that they have to let their long-time nanny go because their kids are too old.
We worked the process hard and it was frustrating at times because twice we found great people and they leveraged our offer to get more money from the family they were currently working for. But like you guys, we have extremely demanding jobs and we needed someone that could run our household while we're gone. If you want a list of the 4-5 agencies we tried to use send me a private message.
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