I'm having a lot of trouble finding a nanny who will agree to come for an interview. I've had a few enthusiastic responses to my adverts on childcare websites, local noticeboards etc, but once I try and pin the person down to a date and time for interview, I get the most transparent excuses. Eg. 'I read the ad wrong and actually I want a job starting four weeks earlier [in August when most families are away?!] so I'm no longer interested', or 'I've had a massive family emergency and don't know where I'll be living in September'. One or two of them are probably true but there have been a whole string of them. I've tried to find nannies at other times of the year and run into the problem that most nannies seeking new positions do the changeover in September when children they've been caring for start school. Moreover there are loads of people in my area in London offering their services as nannies, so it's doubly frustrating as I would have thought that now (late July) would be an ideal time to search.
Anyway, at this point I'm starting to get paranoid and am starting to wonder if there is some rate-your-family website (aka that Rate My Professors site for university students) that we have been trashed on, so that potential nannies are initially keen and then they go away and search and find some libellous thing about us online which causes them to cancel the interview. I think we have been good employers - we have paid a decent wage, always paid on time, our kids are well-behaved when we're not around (according to other babysitters, parents of friends when they go on playdates etc), didn't expect unreasonable things - I have been racking my brains to think of something we might have done wrong. The one thing that did happen was that we had a previous nanny who did something horribly egregious that could have put our children in danger. (I don't want to give details in case I out myself, but it resulted in my husband being summoned immediately to the school for a meeting with the head teacher and other teachers because they were so concerned, and they said it was the kind of thing they would normally report to the local authority. When he messaged me to tell me I almost threw up, it was such a shock.) After that incident, we could not leave our children with her unsupervised at all, and had to fire her. We had only begun with her recently and so did not have a contract yet, and we were so furious at her that we did not offer to give her however many weeks' pay, and she did not ask us (she understood the magnitude of her mistake). It was a horrible situation, and very upsetting, but now I fear she has written something nasty about us online and it is turning potential nannies off.
So, if anyone knows of a review site that we could check, I'd be grateful to know about it. Thanks.