More aupair advice please !

[naughtymummy]

We are in the process of recruiting an aupair via aupair world, have kind of got the hang of it I think and am in email contact with one very hopeful girl. When and how did you "close the deal" ? how many emails did you all exchange first ? What kind of response rate did you get from emails sent following a positive reply ? I do find it all a bit overwhelmming TBH

Following advice on here,I sent a whole list (30!) of questions to any interested AuPairs who had responded.This acted as a natural filter.I ended up with about 4 or 5 emails (to a lovely,girl)before I was completely sidetracked by an au pair already in the country and that's when it went wrong.

So I guess the answer is as many as you feel necessary to feel comfortable with offering her the job.

Where is she from?

HAve you spoken to her by phone?

She is 28 and German, both good things in my book and has aupaired twice before. No haven't spoken to her by phone would you recommend that? Our emails are now quite chatty and we have talked about start dates, I have sent her a job description...which she accepted seems to be going well

Similar to Whoosh. I send some blurb about us as a family, a few photos and a list of 40 questions or so. That will massively filter the responses to ones who are seriously interested. Following that I will likely have backwards forwards email chats with any I am interested in (usually stemming from them asking us questions). If we feel we like someone from this we may phone, or at the very least follow up references. We then continue email chats periodically until they start (get them feeling part of the family before they even arrive). However, I have decided now flights are so cheap that for the next one we may fly them over for a weekend to properly get to know them - if I had done that with the last one we would have avoided a disaster.

Sounds excellent-I personally would always chat to them on the phone.
You won't necessarily discover anything monumental but will give you an idea of her conversational ability and whether all her answers were written by someone else or even if she sounds "smiley".

Good luck-let us know how it goes!

I think flying her over for a weekend is a realy good idea hopefully she would then feel too guilty not to start when she said she would.Also if theres a huge personality clash we can avoid a diaster Thanks for that