Au pair references....

[morey]

I would value some advice from those who have employed an au pair.
We are recruiting an au pair for late Aug/Sept and I have been using Great Au Pair. I have a 19 year old German girl who I have had several skype calls with and who I have offered the position to. She sent me through her references which were all from some work experience placements in 2008, but she doesn't seem to have anything more recent as she has ignored this in emails when I have asked her. I suggested a teacher, or some one she babysat for.

What do you think? Many thanks.

Ask her again as the only question in another e mail. If she ignores that I would be quite wary tbh

Thanks, will do.
TBH, au pair recruiting seems quite difficult as you get so many who express an interest, you put a lot of effort in and then it seems a lot just aren't ready to commit!
Guess it comes after 6 years of having a great very reliable nanny!

The fact that she seems to be avoiding the issue is what would concern me. Not being able to produce a reference from anyone between the ages of 16 and 19 would make it a no go for me, a lot of change and growing up (or not!) happens at that stage. If they were her "wild years" you would want to be fairly sure they were over - I would want to hear "mature, reliable, trustworthy" about someone I was going to have living in my home looking after my kids.

H

I wrote a very long message but then left the PC for a cup of tea and it has been disappeared ? To sum up:

IME online AP's don't get the reference thing. It is really important for us but they often post their profiles in a sort of I'll see how it goes train of thought.

So what I do now is any interesting APs get a 1 pager from me with all the boring stuff before we even proceed to interview - eg house rules, 2 verifiable written references, 10 questions on why they want to be AP, experience with children, scenarios eg what would you do if ? then if all that is OK we proceed to interview.

It cut down my AP world list from 200 applications to about 10 serious ones.

Happy to share if you like. HTH.