Overview
Finding a babysitter is hard for parents, but being a babysitter can also be rough. On short notice it can be really stressful to find someone with the necessary skills at a reasonable price. As a babysitter your jobs can come in so sporadically that you can go several weeks without a gig, making it hard to make serious money from. That’s why services like Sittercity exist, to bridge the gap between these two sides and make it easier for both parents and sitters to find each other and start a business relationship.
The Claim
They claim to use a four-step screening process to weed out the lousy sitters and so you’re only presented with quality babysitters. You can quickly access their profile, which includes their qualifications and their previous work history. Going deeper, you can look over their background check, read what other parents have said about them, and check their references.
They also say that you can post your babysitter or nanny job, and let them come to you, rather than trying to find one by browsing profiles.
The Hype
The hype is that Sittercity is just one of several babysitter directories, but they are growing in popularity and looking to be the one source parents think of when they need a night out.
The Cost
For parents you get one week to try out the service, which is definitely enough time to find and hire a sitter for their first gig. If things work out with them that might be all you need. If you’d like to go back to the well it will cost either $35 a month, or $70 for the year which includes free background checks.
As a sitter you just need to take a pledge and register. It’s free to join, as they wouldn’t be able to offer their service if they didn’t have a large pool of applicants available.
The Commitment
Just because all of the information that you would need is presented to you at Sittercity, you still have to be the one that goes through all of the profiles and ultimately makes a final decision on which sitter to go with. They can help you make a more informed decision in less time, but you still need to find someone that resonates with you.
If you are using Sittercity to find more babysitting jobs, you’ll need to completely fill out your profile, including having a background check performed, submitting your references, encourage positive reviews from parents you’ve sat for, and answering all of your interview questions correctly. This can take a lot of commitment, because many of the parents that will use a service like Sittercity are very concerned about their children, and are looking for sitters that are a cut above the rest.
Why It Gets a Win
The reason we are giving a yes to Sittercity is that they let you drill down your options based on your own criteria. This filters out hundreds of sitters that aren’t matched up with what you find important, and only leaves behind the ones that have the features you want. This cuts down on a lot of weeding out that would pop up eventually anyway. Say for example you don’t want a smoker, that’s one of the options you can exclude. You can also filter out sitters that won’t work on weekends, or on special holidays – important when you want a sitter for Valentine’s day.
Why we like it: Not all parents are the same, or hold the same views of what is important. Rather than Sittercity telling us what’s good for our kids, they let us decide, and set out own guidelines on which ones to go with.
We are giving Sittercity our Thumbs Up. They have thought of everything a parent should think about when screening potential babysitters, and the time savings is invaluable. Being able to quickly browse through things that would be difficult or impossible to see by going about it the conventional way is worth the purchase price for a month or a year. For example, how likely is it that you are going to run background checks on the sitters you are considering if you go about the search on your own?
Also, since all of the information has already been collected and presented in one place, you can cover much more ground in less time, finding better quality sitters than you would if you just asked around in your social network.
Our Recommendation
If you’re fed up with finding sitters the old fashioned way, you should definitely give the one week trial a go at Sittercity. At the end of one week if you haven’t found a good babysitter, just cancel. If you have found one, you can still cancel. If you haven’t found one, but think that you could if you just had a little more time, stay on for a month or just pay the one-off price for the year. No matter which way you go, the time savings will justify the expense.
Official Website: SitterCity
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View Comments
NO NOT USE THIS SERVICE! We wish we could select zero stars. Pay attention to the one-star reviews of Sittercity -- there is a reason for that! Also note that they do not accept Google Pay or Apple Pay -- credit card ONLY. There is a reason for this, as other reviewers have consistently noted. This company practices dishonest billing practices. We signed up for a 3-month "premium" account because it was the only way we could contact potential pet sitters. Everything about the sign-up for this makes it seem as if you are signing up for a defined period of time (in our case, 3 months). Instead, when you sign up for the premium account, you are unknowingly signing up for an auto-pay subscription service -- with no advance notification that you will be billed (such as the transparent and ethical way in which Amazon and Netflix notify subscribers). The fee is just deducted from your bank account and when you call on that same day to explain that you did not sign up for an additional 3 months (while the charge is still pending), no one answers the phone. And no one ever will -- the message is "we are either in a meeting or on the phone." We called more than 20 times on that first day and a handful of times the following day. When you send an email, you are assigned a case number, but you will never receive a response. On that same day, I reached out to customer service on the website and got nothing but canned responses (“All of our Premium Membership plans are subscription based and automatically renew unless canceled, as stated on the sign-up page, on your receipt, and in our Terms of Use. Members have the option to cancel at any time through their Account Settings or by calling, chatting, or emailing our Customer Success team. We understand that life is busy and it can be easy to overlook our auto-renew policy. We routinely review our communications, and your feedback is very helpful as we look to reduce the potential for confusion.”). Is this true? Yes -- but trust us, there is no place where that information is prominently explained. Instead, after we checked, we were satisfied that the 3-month period is all we were signing up for. Obviously, Sittercity's business model relies on people not reading the fine print. While they may not legally have to notify you that they are billing you, this is the ethical, transparent way to conduct business. More disturbing are the reviews that state that even after cancellation, Sittercity continued to deduct payment. This is why I feel compelled to warn others, so that they will be saved from the same grief.
Sittercity would be good to use if you have just moved to a new city or town and don't know anyone, but I wouldn't like the idea of having a complete stranger coming to my home or let alone watching my kids. I would rather ask coworkers or friends if they have family members that do babysitting as more than likely there is a teenager looking to make extra money.
We actually use sittercity all the time for our kids. We've never had a problem and now we just tend to use the same sitter all the time. I guess there could be issues with letting strangers in to your house, and i know people have heard horror stories about sittercity, but i've got nothing bad to say about my experience with them. In fact, we've also just hired a pet sitter through them too!
We signed up for the 1 month package as we needed a sitter a couple of times. We ended up not getting a sitter from sittercity because we didn't like the applicants that came to us. Also, even though it's a 1 month package, they sign you up to an auto-renew system so you will be paying $35 per month all the time unless you cancel.
It's a nice idea and i'm sure it's being used quite a bit, but it didn't work for me. I tried contacting loads of sitters and none of them came back to me. I posted a job on there and got quite a few replies. The problem then was that none of them were willing to arrange a date or time for me to meet them prior to giving them the job - which was important to me because there was no way i'd let somebody in my house with my child without meeting them first.