One of the most critical decisions you’ll make as a parent is who will look after your children. A lot of trust and reliance is needed to leave your children with a stranger. Due to these reasons, finding a nanny for your kids can be an overwhelming process. But still, many families take this task into their own hands. Soon, after spending several hours trying to find the right child-caregiver, they realize that the task is not as easy as they would have thought.
Posting the job, screening the applicants, contacting them, conducting interviews, and finally selecting a candidate can be tedious and time-consuming jobs. From our experience, families can take around 20-25 hours to do these tasks on their own. And considering how busy parents can be with their work, these are a lot of hours.
Benefits of hiring a nanny through an agency
- Reliable: Caregivers hired through an agency are more likely to stay with the family for a long time than the ones hired from a job site. A nanny agency works with nannies throughout the year, and they know exactly what qualities are needed in a child-caretaker. Using this experience, agencies can easily sort out qualified and experienced candidates from a large pool of candidates.
- Hassle-free: Families who hire a nanny through an agency do not need to worry about any of the recruitment processes. A nanny agency does all the heavy lifting by screening a large pool of applicants, interviewing them, checking their documents, and finally placing them in a family. Extraordinarily little time investment is required from the parent-employers in this process.
- Personalized service: When parents contact an agency to hire a caretaker for their children, they usually present the agency with some requirements. These requirements could be general but also special in some cases (example; a nanny who drives). An agency has a vast pool of candidates, from local to international caregivers. Within one week, an agency can offer the family 3 to 5 candidates, who fulfill most of the family’s requirements.
- Support: The job of a nanny agency doesn’t end with the placement of a caregiver with the family. If any issues pop up between the two parties, an agency solves the disputes and comes up with a solution to satisfy both parties. In rare cases, if the parents want another employee, the agency offers them other nannies to replace their old ones.
- Legal Documentation: When there are no local & qualified candidates available, we as an agency always advise the family to hire a foreign nanny. In such cases, there is a lot of legal paperwork that needs to be done to immigrate the international candidate. A nanny agency takes care of all this documentation till the nanny arrives in Canada. In some cases, to hire a caregiver who is already in Canada, the government demands an LMIA from the family. As expected, an agency will take care of this paperwork as well.
If you would like to know how to hire an international nanny, you can read this blog of ours: How to hire a nanny from abroad in Canada?
What did families dislike the most about online job search sites?
Just in case you were wondering, “What happens if I as a family hire a nanny from a job website?”. Then you should look at the issues that families usually handle when they hire a childcare worker from such sites:
- Unqualified candidates: On online job sites, it is often hard to validate the qualifications of a nanny. The employers may get multiple applications from candidates who may have no relevant experience.
- Time investment: It is hard to find a caregiver for your children among hundreds of candidates. Most of the time, these applicants either do not match the requirements of the parents or are simply not qualified enough.
- No long-term commitment: You should not be surprised to see many jobseekers who are still studying in colleges or universities. These students only look for nanny jobs for a short interval of time and change jobs as soon as a new opportunity arises.
- Nannies do not travel to suburbs: Most of the nannies are only located in the city centres and localities around it. Also, they may not have driving skills to help them commute without relying on public transport. Because of these reasons, many local caregivers refuse to travel to distant cities or suburbs. These distant locations may not even have nannies in their job market.
- Foreign candidates may not be eligible: Sometimes parents of the children take the risk of sponsoring a foreign applicant without taking the help of a nanny agency. In these situations, the candidate may not be qualified to immigrate to Canada, as they may not fulfill the requirements of the program.
Conclusion
The internet is full of freelance nannies, which makes it easy to understand the appeal of hiring one on your own. But hiring a nanny on your own is certainly not the right choice for everyone. Families with limited resources may actually save money by hiring a nanny through an agency. And families who need care immediately rather than waiting through an application process will get a speedy response from an agency that is familiar with local regulations and has the facilities to verify the credentials of their candidates beyond just the resume. The agency can also manage the legal paperwork if the parents decide to hire a caregiver from abroad for the long term.
