Executive Search for the Private Household

Why hiring the right person for your home has more in common with recruiting a chief executive than with finding a babysitter.

Most people picture a nanny agency as a place that keeps a list and forwards résumés. That is not what serious domestic placement is, and it is not what we do. Over more than twenty-five years, this work has become something much closer to executive search. We are engaged to find one particular person for one of the most sensitive and consequential roles a household has, and we approach it the way a search firm approaches placing a chief executive: with rigor, discretion, and judgment.

These are senior positions. They are salaried professional roles, not casual hourly help, even though hourly figures appear in our paperwork to keep things simple for everyone. Compensation reflects the seniority. It is uncommon for us to place a full-time professional earning under $80,000 dollars a year, and in a recent year a number of the people we placed earned more than $200,000, several above $250,000 with benefits. That is more than many executives at major companies take home, and it is not an accident.

Why so much? Because at this level, caliber and cost are correlated, and you cannot pull them apart. You cannot expect a professional who is educated, articulate, polished, deeply reliable, sometimes fluent in several languages, and able to live and commute in a high-cost city, and then pay them as though the work were unskilled. The number reflects the person. A lower number simply buys a different person, and most families who try to economize here learn that lesson the expensive way.

It also shapes who we will and will not represent. We are not looking for career-changers. Every economic downturn brings a wave of calls from people who have lost a job in another field and heard that this work pays well, who tell us they raised their own children or that they are wonderful with their nieces and nephews. Those are not our candidates. We look for genuine experience: ideally several years with one family, then several with another, across different ages, often with special-needs or teaching experience, whether preschool or homeschooling, and a working command of the many child-rearing methodologies that families now expect a professional to know. The depth here is real, and it is exactly what separates a professional from an enthusiast.

So what does executive search actually mean in practice? It means we spend a great deal of time understanding a family before we present a single candidate, because a lasting match is as much about temperament and fit as it is about a résumé. And it means we read candidates closely. A single sentence in a conversation can change our entire view of whether someone belongs in a particular home: the way they speak about a former employer, how they refer to a member of a household they once worked in, what they choose to mention and what they leave out. Reading those cues is the real product. It is what twenty-five years teaches, and it is the thing you are actually paying us for.

It is also why our reach is global. The best professionals are not bound to a single zip code. For the right role, they will relocate, across the country or across the world. The right person for your home may not live near it today, and that has never been an obstacle to placing them.

None of this is meant to suggest that only the largest households with the grandest demands deserve excellent help. Most of the families we work with want something quite straightforward: to know their home and their children are cared for properly, by someone they can trust without reservation, so that they can step away with an easy mind. What we have learned over twenty-five years is that delivering that, reliably and for years, is a senior hire. Treating it as one, from the very first conversation, is what makes it last.

That is the difference between a placement that fills a gap for a season and one that becomes part of a family for years. Finding it is executive search, and it is the only kind of work we do. This is how we work at Nannies + more…®, on every placement.