How to find and hire a nanny in Sydney

Booking a babysitter takes a message. Hiring a nanny takes a fortnight, because you are filling a role in your household rather than covering an evening. Almost all of the work is before the first day, and the families who find it easy are the ones who did that part properly.

Settle the shape before you write the ad

Most stalled nanny searches are not a shortage of nannies. They are a family that has not decided what it wants, advertising for it anyway, and then finding that nobody they meet quite fits.

That last one is where budgets break. A nanny working regular hours in your home is almost always your employee, and the hourly rate is not the cost of the arrangement. We have set out the on-costs and what Sydney nannies are asking in what a nanny costs in Sydney. Read that before you name a number anywhere.

Where to find a nanny in Sydney

Once the shape is settled, there are four places Sydney families actually find one, and they are worth trying in this order because the cheap ones are also the fast ones.

Start by reading profiles. Nannies in Sydney lists the people near you who have said they want regular ongoing work, closest first, and find a nanny near you goes suburb by suburb. Every profile is free to browse and free to message, what people are asking and how far they travel is easier to read there than to guess at, and messaging three people today costs you nothing but the writing.

The second is an ad, covered in the next section: nannies whose travel radius reaches your suburb see it without you finding them one by one. The third is word of mouth — the school gate, your street, and local parents' Facebook groups, where the answer is usually a nanny finishing up with another family. It produces one very well-vouched-for candidate a month rather than a shortlist this week, so run it alongside the first two rather than instead of them.

The fourth is an agency, which does the finding and some of the checking for you and charges a placement fee or an ongoing margin for it. What an agency does not change is the part below: you are still the employer, the trial and the referees still tell you the most, and the Check is still yours to sight. This guide is the do-it-yourself version of exactly that work.

What to put in the ad

A job ad here asks for the days and times you need, the ages of your children, a note on what to expect, and a rate guide. There is no box that marks an ad as a nanny role rather than a babysitting one, so the words have to do it.

Spell the days and hours out rather than writing "flexible", which reads as undecided and puts off exactly the people who have their own week to fit you into. Say that the role is ongoing, give a start date, and say roughly how long if you know. Name your children's ages and anything about their week that shapes the job. Say what the job includes beyond supervision, and what you genuinely need on day one: a licence, a Check, experience with a particular age.

Then name a rate, or a range. An ad without one saves you nothing and costs you the same conversation three times over.

Check the Check, then have the conversation

A nanny is doing child-related work as NSW defines it, so they need a Working With Children Check, and the duty to verify it lands on you rather than on an employer or an agency. Nobody sends you a reminder. The babysitter vs nanny guide explains where that line sits and why, and how to check a WWCC is the step by step. It is free and takes about two minutes.

Do it early. Checking before you meet someone costs nothing, and it stops you explaining a bad result away after you have already decided you like them.

Once someone is past that, the interview is the same conversation you would have with a babysitter, asked harder: the questions and what a good answer sounds like are in questions to ask a babysitter. For an ongoing role, push hardest on two of them. How they handle a day that goes wrong, and why the last ongoing role ended.

Pay for a trial shift

Meet first, briefly, without the children. Then run a real shift with them, at the real time of day, with you out of the house for at least part of it.

An hour of watching someone with your children tells you more than an hour of asking them about children. You are looking at how they are when nobody is performing: whether they get down to the child's level, whether they ask you or guess, and what the house looks like at the end.

Ring two referees who employed them in an ongoing care role, not character references. The question worth asking a former employer is whether they would have them back.

Put it in writing before the first day

Nothing drafted by a lawyer. One document you both have a copy of, agreed before the start date rather than renegotiated in month three.

The review date is the item people skip and the one that earns its place. Nanny arrangements drift: an extra afternoon here, the shopping added there, a rate that has not moved in two years while the job has. A date in the calendar turns that into a conversation instead of a resignation.

What we do, and what is yours

Sitters here say which kind of work they want, casual babysitting or regular ongoing work, and plenty say both. That answer is theirs rather than our guess about them, and it is what puts someone in front of you when you are looking for ongoing care.

Sitters can opt in to verification: we check a government ID against a matching selfie, and we check their WWCC status directly with the Office of the Children's Guardian. Those profiles carry a badge with the month we checked. Profiles without one say which of the two checks is outstanding, in the same place a badge would sit, and link to what the checks involve. What they do not do is the asking for you. Sighting the Check is still yours.

Everything after that is yours. We do not screen for competence, we do not place anyone, we never touch the money, and we take no cut of what you agree. The trial, the referees and the decision are the parts nobody can do for you, and they are the parts that decide how this goes.