and use 18185 to ring them on a land-line - they have to provide one or I won't consider. Most calls are 1p a minute.
I only ring at Final Interview Stage (ie am happy with replies to my questions via email). If they want me to ring them, forget it. I am employing them, not them employing me.
Questions:
- Why do you want to become an Au Pair?
- Why do you want to come to London?
- Do you have any friends/relatives in London or the UK?
- If so, where do they live?
- Have you looked after children before? If so what were their ages and were they boys or girls?
- What was you favourite part of looking after them?
- What aspect of children?s behaviour do you not like?
- dd2 likes to say ?No? a lot ? how would you deal with this?
- dd1 is very slow in everything she does ? how would you encourage her to speed up?
10. What activities/pastimes have you done in the last month?
11. What do you plan to do in your spare time when you are with us?
12. Are your parents happy with your decision to become an Au Pair?
13. What pocket money are you expecting? (This will be for 25 hours a week plus 2 evenings a week babysitting.)
14. Do you have a bank account?
15. Do you have the funds for your flight to the UK?
16. Have you had any first aid training?
17. What food do you like?
18. What food do you not like?
19. What is your favourite meal?
20. We like our girls to eat healthily ? do you know what this means?
21. dd2 is lactose intolerant ? do you have any allergies yourself?
22. Do you have any phobias?
23. Describe your health in the past year.
24. What interested you to the role we are offering?
25. Are there any aspects of the role that you need further explanation on?
I set the questions up as a template and each "Yes" answer I get on APW, I send these to. It weeds out the flakey ones. I get a 20% reply rate which is good enough for the serious ones.
Also, my search profile on APW is very restricted, previously I was including ALL nationalities and got a lot of time wasters. I now restrict it to those countries in the EU (excluding Portugese - search my threads and you will see why!).
Also, in my Profile on APW, I am very detailed as to the type of person I am looking for and where we exactly live (weeds out those looking for Central London). I spent a good couple of hours sorting out my profile and it was invaluable in restricting timewasters.
The one thing I found with Agencies is that they asked me to complete questions which were very similar to the profile set up on APW and all the interviewing I had to do myself - so not disimilar to APW recruitment process.