I have been in DFW for the past 3+ months, having come ready to jump into the world of a professional nanny for business people, and or professional athletes. This is a big city, with people of all types, and apparently enough money and demand to have a least 2 nanny agencies to raise all their children. The online applications were lengthy and complicated, I had to go to a "Professional Development Class" for nannies, and still the jobs were not coming through. Some interviews had materialized, but I was not even getting to a 2ed interview. Was it me? was I coming across too abrupt or sterile? So, I made a portfolio, a scrapbook per-say, of me spending time with my nanny children over the past 5 years. And I started doing more research on my kids who I would be working with, AND I starting coming to interviews with all of this PLUS a sample of our daily schedule and how it would evolve as the children got older. The key to all of this was the questions that I started asking the parents:
What type of community do you live in?
Describe your families lifestyle.
What are your dietary beliefs?
--and the most important one--
How do you see your nanny fitting into your family?
In college, they drilled us all the time on what questions we would ask potential employers. How could we tactfully find out if the job was going to work for us? This skill must have been pretty rusty for me looking back on those first couple of interviews. Pretty much, I showed up and expected to be hired. --not the case, lesson learned
