Twenty-Five Years of Executive Search for Private Households

What a quarter-century in this work has taught us, and why it still comes down to a single discipline.

We have been placing exceptional professionals in private households since 1999. Twenty-five years is a long time in any field, and in ours it has meant watching the world of private service change a great deal while the thing at the center of it has not changed at all. What follows is less a history than a reflection on what endures, and why it has shaped how we work.

When we began, the work of connecting families with household professionals was a matter of relationships, judgment, and trust, built one placement at a time. A quarter-century later, with far more sophistication, technology, and scale available, it is still, fundamentally, a matter of relationships, judgment, and trust. The tools have improved; the essence has not moved. The families who entrust us with their homes and their children are buying the same thing they always were: the right person, thoroughly known and genuinely suited, placed with care.

What twenty-five years teaches, above all, is the primacy of fit and the value of longevity. We learned, across thousands of placements, that the measure of our work is not how quickly a search closes but how long the placement lasts, and that lasting placements come from matching for genuine fit rather than mere availability. It is why we became, and remain, exacting about whom we represent, accepting fewer than 1 in 10 applicants, and why our placements stay an average of more than five years. Those numbers are not marketing; they are the accumulated result of a discipline held consistently over decades.

Experience also teaches how to move quickly without cutting corners. Twenty-five years of building relationships and refining a process means that when a family needs the right person, we usually know how to find them, even when they are not already in our network, and can often do so in a matter of weeks, or, when needed, far faster. Speed, in this work, is a product of experience, not a substitute for diligence.

We have also watched the scope of the work broaden. What began centered on childcare grew, as families' lives grew more complex, to encompass senior and adult care, estate and household management, and the staffing of entire households across the world. The through-line held: whatever the role, the work is to recruit the right professional to a precise brief, vet them rigorously, and place them with judgment. We came to think of it as executive search applied to private life, because that is what it is.

And we have learned, again and again, that this work is built on trust, and that trust must be earned and verified rather than assumed. The families we serve tell us a great deal, because they must, and they rely on us to protect it and to place into their homes only people who will honor it. A quarter-century of being worthy of that trust is, in the end, the thing we are proudest of, and the thing that keeps families returning to us across years and generations.

Twenty-five years on, our standard is what it was at the start: a single discipline, practiced with care, placing the rare few who will care for a family's children and home exactly as the family would. The world around the work has changed. The work itself, and the standard we hold it to, has not. This is how we work at Nannies + more…®, on every placement.