Building Your Profile for Babysitting Jobs
Out of the many part-time jobs you can choose during college, babysitting can be one of the best options. You can take control of many aspects of your job — your pay, boss, number of hours, expected workload, etc.
However, as it is a heavily sought-after job for many college-aged students, you may find yourself struggling to stand out in the sea of applicants for specific babysitting jobs, especially those seemingly too-good-to-true babysitting gigs that come with a high pay and relaxed proposed schedule.
One of the many things you can do to make yourself have a better chance at securing a babysitting gig is building a great profile or bio to showcase yourself to potential employers. If you’re having trouble with building a strong profile to make you stand out among other contenders with generic profiles, read on to find out what strong profiles often include.
Details of experience
Just like any job resume, you want to promote any experience you may have. Instead of just saying that you have three years of babysitting experience, go into depth about those three years of experience. Were you tutoring the kids you babysat? How many hours did you work in those three years — an hour or two a day?
The more that potential employers know you are capable of, the more attracted they will be to your profile and what you can offer as a babysitter.
If you don’t have experience in babysitting alone, think of other jobs that you have had that would help you babysit children. Maybe you spend every summer volunteering at a day camp with kids or have worked the front desk at a pediatrician’s office for a year. Any experience you have spending time with children is the type of experience you want to include in your profile, especially if you don’t have actual babysitting experience.
Skills
On top of experience you have, include skills that can set you apart from other applicants. If you speak another language, include them in your profile. Many families look for multilingual babysitters that can help their children practice their native tongue or even help pick up a new language with.
Depending on the age of the children you are babysitting, parents may also be looking for babysitters that are willing to help their children with their studies when they babysit them after school. List subjects you are well-versed in and willing to help children with.
Skills like cooking and first aid are always a plus for parents. They don’t want their kids to be starving or subjected to eating junk while they are under your watch. They also don’t want their kids to be under the care of someone with no knowledge of first aid or CPR, so if you haven’t gotten certification for it, try to in order to be able to put it on your profile.
References from past babysitting gigs
Regardless of the type of experience you may have, having babysitting experience in itself is a great thing to have under your belt as parents want someone they know can be up to the job. However, even if you put whatever amount of years and skills on your profile, they may have leftover uncertainty if you still seem a little too perfect.
Instead of letting them skip over your profile for not taking it seriously for having no faults/being too good to be true, include references that they can contact to get testimonies of your experience and skill set. They will want to hear from fellow parents that have spent time with you as their family babysitter, as they are more likely to trust fellow parents than a random stranger wanting employment from them.
If you do provide their contact information, be sure to contact your previous employers to ask them for permission for them to be contacted by potential future employers as to not be caught off guard or annoyed at your letting out their contact information to strangers.
Flexibility and availability
When it comes to babysitting, gigs can require a few hours a day after the children get out of school or whole days out of the week when the children are on break. Different families will ask for different tasks and amounts of hours from you. To make the search easier for potential employers, make your flexibility known on your profile along with your availability.
If you can only do weekends, make it clear on your profile so that employers and yourself don’t get hopes up for job offers that lead to dead ends. If you are flexible and available on call (no school or other responsibilities during summer) it definitely won’t hurt to add onto your profile to attract employers.