Sara S.

We hired Sara to be an after-school nanny for our kids. When she wrote to us responding to our SitterCity ad we took time out of a family vacation to interview her to keep things moving along quickly for her. She seemed thoughtful, and her references mostly had good things to say about her, and on the basis of that we hired her. We were very clear on hours, expectations, rate of pay, and that we were withholding FICA taxes (as required by law), and everything seemed promising. But the closer we got to the start date things started to veer off. She initially told us she had time to do some babysitting in October before starting full on in November, but as we negotiated those October dates, the dates she was available kept changing and then just vanished altogether. It was a bit frustrating. Furthermore, though we were very clear on the fact that it was a federal requirement that we withhold FICA taxes from her pay given how much she would be paid each calendar year, she tried to negotiate ways to get around that right before the date of hire. And when she finally showed up for day one she was hardly impressive --- she didn't show much enthusiasm, and didn't seem very interested or inspired in terms of how she was planning on handling our kids. And that was with a working parent in the house. When she played with our 7-yo son, she was passive, reacting but not really engaged. But we had agreed to a 4-6 week evaluation period, so we were willing to give her a chance to get settled in. Unfortunately our daughter got pink eye the next day, and Sara chose to not watch her while she was sick, so for that first week, Sara mainly brought our son home from school and dropped him off. Then, that weekend, she promptly quit, saying that the tax withholding and the hours didn't work for her and that she'd found a job that paid her more. This was not in the spirit of the evaluation period we agreed upon, and she didn't even try to negotiate with us in good faith for better terms. It was sudden, unexpected, and it really left us in the lurch. She never disclosed that she was shopping around and looking for another job, and she wasted a ton of our time in the hiring process. All of this is to say that we cannot recommend Sara. She didn't show the kind of commitment, reliability, maturity, engagement, and responsibility we expect of a nanny.