sittercity.com - Stuff Parents Need

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We have a wonderful babysitter who is a college student here in town, and she is heading back home for the summer in just a week! ACK!!! So the search is on for someone to help with the girls once a week. I’m looking to Sittercity to help me find a qualified and reliable placement. It’s a service I have used before, and one that I would recommend!

I hope for your sake that you have a regular babysitter, and that s/he isn’t leaving you for the summer! If you DO have someone who helps you out and who you think must surely be among the best sitters around, then you need to listen up! Sittercity is hosting the 2nd Annual Sittercity America’s Top Sitter Contest!

Sittercity's America's Top Sitter Contest

Now through May 2nd you can nominate your sitter by uploading a picture of them. Then submit information about just what makes your sitter amazing and irreplaceable! A panel of experts will choose 10 finalists. From there, Sittercity’s Facebook community will select the winner (and the winner gets $5,000! Talk about a babysitting bonus!!!).

Remember, submissions are only accepted until May 2nd, and the voting period for the top 10 runs from May 13-19.

If your sitter has what it takes to be the next America’s Top Sitter, then nominate them today! Sittercity’s America’s Top Sitter: Nominate Your Sitter Today, deadline: May 2, 2014

And if you ARE currently looking for a sitter, don’t worry! Sittercity’s got you covered. I’ve even got a discount for you!

When we moved to Chattanooga 3 years ago, I had no idea how to find a babysitter. We didn’t know a soul in the city other than the folks who hired Tim for his job. Finding a quality babysitter felt like a pretty insurmountable task, I have to admit.

But we did find a babysitter, and once she graduated from college, we found another one. I’m going to tell you the two ways I found these girls, and hopefully the information will help you out!

Career Services Classifieds

For our latest hire, I checked out the career services office for our local university. I noticed that they offered job postings for their students to browse, and allowed businesses and individuals to post opportunities free of charge. So I put together an ad with what I was looking for (expected hours, pay, ages of my kids, etc.) and I requested interested applicants to send me their resume and their available hours for the semester. Within a week I had 17 applications. What an awesome response! Because I got such a great response, I got to be very choosy, and now my kids have a VERY sweet new babysitter who just started her first year at college, which makes me hopeful that she’ll be with us for 3 or 4 years!

Sitter City

If you don’t have a local university or if they don’t offer a job placement board, you might want to try the method we used to find our first sitter. We got a membership to Sitter City (*affiliate link) and it served us really well. We were able to post a job opportunity there for potential sitters to view and apply for, and we were also able to reach out to sitters in the database who might be good matches to bring their attention to our posting. The website is very secure, and sitters in the database have to go through background checks. It was a very efficient system and it was so nice to have instant access to an entire list of people in the area who were looking for babysitting opportunities. It basically made an impossible task become not hard at all!

Right now Sitter City is offering 30% off its 3 month membership (I think a 3 month membership is a great choice, as it will give you plenty of time to find your perfect sitter). The 3 month plan is $49, but with the 30% off coupon, it is just $34.30. That’s about what I pay for a 3 hour babysitting session at my house…TOTALLY worth it to find the very best person for the job!

So those are the two ways I have successfully found babysitters. How did you find your babysitters?
photo credit: Ioannis Karydis via photopin cc