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[quote=Anonymous]I know how you feel, we went through a similar situation this past spring and summer.

We have had two awesome nannies, one quite good one, and three who were dreadful. Interestingly, the two awesome nannies both applied to an ad we put on Craigslist. In the case of the dreadful nannies, we were in one case in an emergency situation and were lucky to get into a nanny share while we looked for our own nanny. We then had the two dreadful nannies via an online service, one lasted a month before we fired her (and we had to give her a warnng after a week) and the other only lasted a week. In both these cases we were feeling rather rushed and desparate and relied too much on things like glowing letters of reference, without following up enough with references over the phone.

One thing we also found was that we needed to take a lot of time to deal with the process properly - I actually took a bit of time off work to do so - and we had to decide where we were willing to compromise. We wanted live-in, but the pool of candidates was really weak. When we opted for live-out instead, it made a huge difference. We also didn't feel we had to have a 'career nanny', that some kind of well educated person with valuable experience with children might be better, i.e. better to have an awesome nanny for a year than a mediocre nanny for three years.

We ended up with a young woman who is a qualified teacher but doesn't want to work in the regular school system, and has experience in nursery school and similar settings. Her references were absolutely flawless and she made a great impression at interview, plus we did a trial day before making a formal job offer. Also, we just really clicked, and that's really important. She is helpful with things related to the kids, keeps the areas that they use clean and tidy, and is flexible if we need a slightly earlier start or later day, and in return we offer for her to come late or leave early whenever possible, plus we drive her to the train station at the end of the day whenever we can. She might not stay for much more than a year but she is so great with our kids that we can live with that, and she has said that whenever she leaves she will give lots of notice and help with the transition to a new nanny.

So I have no idea of course what your requirements are, but perhaps you need to make some compromises in some areas? Maybe you can't attract the right candidates due to  hours, live in/out preference, amount of housekeeping you want, etc. Also, do more than one interview. At the first interview, don't have the kids around for most if not all of it, so you can talk without interuption. Sometimes it's nice to have the kids there for a little while at the end. But what works for us is to have a second interview of a few hours that is just about hanging out, maybe having a casual lunch at home, and seeing how she interacts with the kids. Then a full trial day or even a week if you can swing it.

Good luck![/quote]

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