How To Choose The Right Babysitter For Your Children

Feb 18

3 min read

I recently had the task of help one of our PAM™ clients find a new babysitter for her children. It was a Monday through Friday position from 4:30-8:30pm. As a working professional with a demanding job, she needed reliable care for her 4 children.

As a small business owner with employees, I have processes in place about who would make a great candidate for the PAM™ team. I already have in my mind certain traits and things that I look for, and then specific interview questions.

It made me think that, business owners interview employees, we should be doing the same thing with the people we will be leaving our children with. After all, keeping children safe is everything.

In this blog post I'll be sharing the steps we took in order to find the "perfect" babysitter.

Brainstorm Traits & Qualifications

We started out by brainstorming specific personality traits in a person that would mesh well with her and her kids:

Someone friendly, but not a push over
Someone who could take charge but wasn't aggressive
Reliable
Active and would enjoy taking the kids out and having them be active
Non smoker
Reliable
Enjoys cooking

Then we thought about other qualifications that would be important for what the family needed:

Experience with special needs children/ADHD
CPR certified
A good swimmer
Driver's license
Someone who may be able to stay later than 8:30pm with short notice.
and more

Draft Interview Questions

The next thing we did was map out the process of interviewing candidates and coming up with interview questions. It was important to us to have a mix of basic questions that asked about their background experience and qualifications like:

How long have you been babysitting?
What do. you like about the job?
What do you dislike?
What do you think children like most about you?
What do you look for in an employer or family that you babysit for?

We also want to ask questions about how they would handle certain situations, or their philosophies on discipline such as:

The baby starts choking while playing with toys. How do you react/what do you do?
Tell me about a time when you had to make a split second decision, without parental input.
How do you typically deal with behavior issues?
What are your views on discipline?

Reflection

After the family interviewed different candidates to babysit their children, they had to take time to reflect about each candidate. Literally time for a gut check. Take a moment to think back on their responses and how the candidate made them feel during the interview and if there were any red flags like:

Speaking negatively about past clients or children they’ve cared for
Seemed distracted or unenthusiastic.

Reference Checks

If everything felt good and aligned, the next step was to call references. And of course, there are questions we already had for that, too. Here are just some of the questions:

How long did they work for you?
How do they respond to feedback?
Did they leave your home tidy?

Don't Ignore Your Gut

Having a set of expectations and questions already prepared ahead of time will help make the interviewing process a lot easier when searching for the perfect babysitter for your children.

And while you can have as many questions prepared ahead of time and maybe everything seems right on paper, I can't stress this enough: follow your gut. If something seems off to you, trust your instincts and keep it moving!