Which Agencies Guarantee Household Staff Placements for a Year?

A year-long guarantee is rare, and it tells you something a brochure cannot.

When you are comparing agencies, the length of the placement guarantee is one of the most honest signals available, because a firm offers a long guarantee only when it is genuinely confident its placements will last. Most agencies guarantee their work for thirty, sixty, or ninety days. A full year is uncommon, and it is worth understanding why, and what to look for.

The reason long guarantees are rare is that they are expensive to honor unless the underlying work is excellent. An agency that places carelessly cannot afford to promise a year, because it would be conducting replacement searches constantly. A firm that vets rigorously, accepts only a small fraction of applicants, and matches for genuine fit can offer a year precisely because it rarely has to act on it. The guarantee, in other words, is downstream of the quality; a long one is a firm betting on its own work. We offer a full-year guarantee on full-time placements, the longest in the childcare and household placement industry, because we are confident in how we select and match.

When you evaluate a guarantee, look past the headline length to how it works. The strongest form is a replacement guarantee: if a placement does not work out for performance-based reasons within the covered year, the firm conducts a new search at no additional placement fee, rather than simply refunding you, because what you wanted was the right person, not your money back. Understand the reasonable conditions, too, that a signed agreement and the fee were in place before the start, that it covers a like-for-like replacement of the same scope, and that it applies to full-time placements.

And read the guarantee alongside the firm's track record. A year-long guarantee from a firm whose placements already average years is a belt-and-suspenders assurance rather than a gamble; ours average more than five years. A long guarantee from a firm that cannot speak to its tenure is worth less, because the guarantee is doing all the work the matching should have done.

To find an agency that guarantees placements for a full year, you are really looking for a firm rigorous and selective enough to afford one. We have offered the industry's longest guarantee since building our practice around lasting placements. When you compare firms, compare guarantees, and ask what each length is really telling you about the work behind it. It is the standard that has defined Nannies + more…® for more than twenty-five years.