The Nanny Chase

If you think hiring a nanny through an agency is no more complicated than picking up the phone and placing an order for Mary Poppins, Martin Walker* has news for you: She isn't that easy to find. Not only do you have to search out a reputable agency - no small task, according to this St. Catharines, Ontario, father of three - then you have to find the right nanny. And if you're lucky enough to find the caregiver of your dreams, there are still references to check, fees to pay and government red tape to wade through before she's happily in your home caring for your kids. "In the end," says Walker, "I managed to recruit a terrific nanny through a top-tier agency, but that was only after checking out a lot of other nanny agencies. You really have to be careful about who you're dealing with."

Laura Kelly*, a southwestern Ontario mother, agrees that you can't be too careful. She says the industry needs to pull up its socks for parents to feel confident in the quality of the nannies. Her family was forced to fire the part-time nanny they'd hired through a local agency just four weeks into the placement because the caregiver in question was so inept when it came to dealing with infants that Kelly felt her son's health and well-being were in jeopardy.

Rather than asking the agency to find her another caregiver, however, Kelly decided to forfeit the $180 placement fee and take matters into her own hands. "I had lost all trust in the agency at this point," she recalls. "I had assumed the candidates had been carefully pre-screened and that the agency would only send qualified people, but that's certainly not what happened in our case."

Like Kelly, Jennifer Fong had a disappointing experience with Toronto-area agencies. "If there was one issue that put a black cloud over my maternity leave, it was finding child care," she recalls. "One of the agencies simply flooded our fax machine with applications, none of which appeared to have been vetted at all." While one of the three agencies ultimately succeeded in finding a nanny for the family, the solution was only temporary: The woman changed her mind about the job two weeks before Fong was scheduled to return to work. Rather than going the agency route again, Fong decided to handle the recruiting herself and, in the end, managed to find a highly skilled nanny who stayed with the family until their recent move to Calgary.

Of course, not everyone who does business with an agency has a nightmarish experience. Walker, for example, is very pleased with the nanny he hired through St. Catharines-based Select Nannies Inc. The secret is to know upfront what to expect and the questions to ask. Here are a few tips:

Cost

According to Eva Knof, owner of the agency Walker ultimately chose, you can expect to pay approximately $235 a week for a live-in nanny in smaller communities and $290 a week in larger centres such as Toronto.

Do some quick number crunching and you'll discover this falls below minimum wage in most parts of the country. In Ontario, for example, where minimum wage is $6.85 an hour, employers are entitled to take up to $85.25 off the weekly wages of a live-in nanny to cover her room and board. Minimum wage rates and employment standards legislation vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, so make sure you have a firm grasp of the rules in your province or territory before you commit to hiring a nanny.

A live-out nanny costs more - about $400 a week in Toronto and $275 in smaller communities - because you can't deduct room and board, but it's still less than what you'd pay for two full-time child-care spaces in a licensed daycare. These typically run between $200 and $250 a week per child. This is one of the reasons why nanny care has particular appeal to families with two or more children. Yet, it's a hefty fee to pay if you're looking for care for your one-and-only.

Agencies often charge a placement fee roughly the equivalent of one month of the nanny's salary (about $1,200, depending on where you live). And, what's more, you might also have to pick up the tab for the nanny's airfare if she's relocating to take the job. For its part, the agency should do some pre-screening - sorting through the resumes and getting rid of all the under qualified candidates so you don't have to do all that weeding yourself - run a criminal reference check on the nanny and provide some sort of placement guarantee. However, the onus is on you to ensure the agency actually follows through and delivers what it promises. This means getting an agreement upfront and ensuring the agency lives up to the letter of that agreement.

Something else to file under buyer beware: Be careful of agencies that collect fees from both families and caregivers. Some have been known to double-dip in this way, skimming money off the nanny's salary. Agencies should collect fees from families, not from the nanny herself.

Regulations

Nanny agencies are covered by the relatively lax laws governing employment agencies rather than the more rigorous standards that apply to licensed child-care operations, according to Martha Friendly of the Childcare Research Unit at the University of Toronto. In the absence of any regulatory body overseeing nanny agencies, parents can find themselves left swinging in the wind if a problem arises.

You wouldn't expect an agency owner to agree with Friendly's take on the situation, but Knof stands behind Friendly's comments 100 percent. "You can run a nanny agency with little more than an answering machine these days," she says.

Or a Web page for that matter. One of the hottest trends in the nanny recruitment business is to charge nannies and parents hefty fees for accessing online databases, whether or not a placement actually occurs. Instead of getting the face-to-face contact and hand holding that occurs when you're dealing with a reputable agency, you can be left paying a sizable fee for what essentially amounts to a do-it-yourself service. (Some sites leave all of the pre-screening up to you, although others are willing to provide this service for an additional fee.)