The summer will be here faster than you might think and you will have to find a suitable babysitter for your precious one. During the summer a lot of people especially students are looking for summer nanny jobs so finding a babysitter is easy but finding the right one for your baby is the key.

With the chaos of the holidays and the speed with which December moves, many parents forget this crucial part of the New Year’s Eve puzzle. Because the holiday season is hectic enough, here is a complete guide to finding and hiring a great babysitter for New Year’s Eve.

WHERE TO FIND BABYSITTERS ONLINE

Online babysitter sources generally fall into two distinct categories: free and fee-based.

Free services are appealing because they cost nothing, but the danger is that anyone could be using them. Choosing which babysitter service is right for you truly depends on your comfort level. If you’re considering a fee-based service, make sure you get what you pay for. A site like this should have:

Babysitters

  • Hundreds, if not thousands, of babysitters in your area for you to choose from
  • Good standing with the Better Business Bureau
  • Plenty of information on each babysitter, including photos, references and reviews
  • Safety features such as background checks, site security scans, profile privacy options, etc.
  • Easily accessible customer service representatives, through both email and phone
  • Good reviews on independent blogs, media sources and more

Sittercity.com, for example, has all of these things and also allows you to conduct a free search so you can see how many babysitters are in your area, how they have been rated/reviewed, what their schedules are and more.

WHEN TO POST YOUR BABYSITTING JOB

Once you choose which online babysitting network to go with, the first thing you’ll want to do is post a job. Posting a babysitting job allows you to tell babysitters exactly what type of sitter you are looking for and lets those sitters come to you. The best time to post a New Year’s Eve babysitting job is in the beginning of December.

Interesting, Sittercity polled parents two weeks before New Year’s Eve a few years ago and found that 77% still did not have their New Year’s Eve babysitter lined up. It’s a common procrastination among parents, which makes it even more important for you to be ahead of the curve so you’re not stuck in a last-minute scramble with all of the other sitter-searching families.

HOW TO POST YOUR BABYSITTING JOB

Posting a New Year’s Eve babysitting job requires a little more planning than a regular Saturday night out. The most successful parents — those who DO post their initial job in early December — will leave four weeks to find a babysitter.

The first post is therefore a "teaser" job that runs for the first two weeks with all the information you have at the time. You should then follow that teaser with the final job posting with all its specifics if the teaser does not bring in the perfect candidate.

This buys you two weeks to woo potential applicants and attempt to lock in the right babysitter as you gather job details, and the chance to post another job if your teaser fails.

WHAT TO PAY A NEW YEAR’S EVE BABYSITTER

Even babysitters like to celebrate New Year’s too; because of this, babysitters need extra (read: financial) incentive to forgo their own plans in favor of a New Year’s Eve babysitting job. To figure out what to pay, you must first decide if you will need the sitter for a few late-night hours or if you will need her overnight.

A few hours
If you plan on coming home after your New Year’s Eve celebration, you will pay your babysitter an hourly rate — a higher hourly rate than you’d normally pay. Most parents typically add an extra $5 to $10 per hour onto their standard hourly rate. If the children are allowed to stay up until midnight, you’ll want to fall on the higher end of that range to compensate the babysitter for keeping the children entertained the entire time.

Overnight
If you’ll be spending the night away from home, you won’t pay your babysitter an hourly rate all through the night; instead, you’ll want to offer a flat rate. To determine this flat rate, first figure out what the babysitter’s hourly rate would be between the time she comes over and 10pm. For example, if she comes over at 5pm and you typically pay her $10/hour, she would earn $50.

Then add a flat overnight rate — typically between $40 and $100 — to that number. Again, since this is a special New Year’s Eve babysitting job, you’ll want your rate to fall at the higher end of that scale. With the total hourly rate added to the overnight rate, you can clearly state the flat rate offer to your babysitter.

What you pay is up to you and your budget, so use this strategy as a guideline to determining a rate that both you and your babysitter are comfortable with.

Check out the Babysitter Rate Calculator linked to at the end of this article to see what the average, non-holiday pay is in your area.

SAMPLE JOB POSTING

We are looking for a professional babysitter for this New Year’s Eve, starting at 8pm in Evanston, IL. Our two boys are 6 and 8, and are very sweet with no allergies. You must have enough energy to stay up with the kids until midnight (if they last!), a good sense of humor and your own transportation, as we will be celebrating the evening with champagne.

Other such posts:

Your Babysitter
Seven Things Your Babysitter Wishes You Knew. By Candi Wingate on Jun 02, 2010. None. Babysitting. We’ve all been there, done that. It’s fun when you’re 15, but some special people do it for much longer than their teenage years.

babysitter may have fallen asleep
The family of a small boy found wandering alone at an East Kansas City apartment complex has been located, police said this evening. “He lives in the complex and evidently his babysitter fell asleep and the child wandered out of the home.

Rules for Babysitters
Mommy Dearest – My Saturday evening babysitter has been with us for a few years now, watching my kids once or twice a month while my husband and I get a break from our home life. She is a local college student and is great.

Hiring a Babysitter for Your Special Needs Child
It is important that the babysitter have some previous training or experience. Be upfront about your child’s abilities and limitations, and ask candidates what they can do to accommodate your child’s unique challenges.

Baby Sitter Price
The first of the new Collector’s Club Editions features a new logo, bright new cover, and fill-in pages to personalize as Kristy comes up with the idea for the Baby-sitter’s Club with friends Claudia, Stacey, and Mary Anne.

daycare for my 4 month baby
Hi Manik, It is really a very difficult decision. Is it not possible for you to extend your maternity leave for another 6 months ? You need to be very careful.


This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Summer Nanny Jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.