What is the best way to find a qualified au pair?
The best way to find an au pair is to check for the largest agency had been around the longest and then to call clients of au pair agency. Now that doesn’t mean you know that specific au pair, it might be somebody who hasn’t come to the United States yet, somebody you don’t really know, but you can get a very good feeling for the quality of au pairs that an agency is training and putting out there for your review. So even though it’s the next best thing to actually knowing that au pair takes good care of kids, that agency (I wouldn’t go with one that hasn’t been around for at least ten years and have plenty of recommendations) if they don’t want to give you information of other placements that they’ve done, sometimes an agency will say “well it’s confidential who our clients are, we don’t provide information.” As soon as you hear that, hang up the phone. Anyone who’s not going to provide you with a direct contact with clients of theirs is somebody you need to be really suspicious of. S
