How to Vet a Care Provider — Nanny, Babysitter, or Senior Caregiver

You had a good conversation. They seemed warm, competent, and easy to talk to, and by the end of the hour you had mostly decided. That feeling is real information — and it is also the least reliable part of the whole process, because it measures how someone performs in a job interview, not how they behave on an ordinary Tuesday three months from now when nobody is watching.

This is one of the highest-stakes hiring decisions a household ever makes — and the one with the least structure around it by default. Hiring at work comes with a job description, more than one interviewer, and a process somebody designed on purpose. Hiring the person who will be alone with your child or your parent for hours at a time comes with none of that unless you build it yourself.

The fix isn’t more suspicion. It’s a small amount of structure: the same questions asked of every family a candidate actually worked for, and a short list of documents checked at the source instead of taken on trust.

If you’re about to make the calls, here are the six, asked of every reference in exactly these words:

1. Can you confirm the dates and responsibilities as they described them?
2. Would you have them back, if you needed care again?
3. Did they turn up when they said they would?
4. Were there any surprises around money or hours?
5. Tell me about the one time something went wrong — how did they handle it?
6. Is there anything you’d want to know, in my position, that I haven’t asked?

There’s more on what each of the six questions confirms and on what to verify, and where below. Everything else here is why those two lists look the way they do.

Two different jobs, not one

References and verification answer different questions, and doing one well does not cover the other. A reference tells you what someone is like to actually have in your house — patient on a bad day, honest when something breaks, good with a frightened kid or a confused parent. Verification tells you whether the things the candidate told you about themselves — their identity, their record, their credentials — are true.

A glowing reference from a family who adored this person tells you nothing about whether their CPR certification lapsed last spring. A clean background check tells you nothing about whether they showed up when they said they would. Skip either half and you’re only half informed, no matter how thorough the half you did was.

Get references from people who actually employed them

Ask directly for the last two or three families, agencies, or facilities the candidate worked with in this kind of role — not a friend, not a former coworker from a different job, and not someone they’d describe as a character reference. A neighbor who likes them is not a family who trusted them with a child, or a parent, unsupervised for a year. The people who actually employed them are the only ones who watched the work closely enough, for long enough, to have something real to say about it.

If a candidate can produce plenty of people who like them but no one who actually employed them for care, treat that as information rather than a technicality — and ask directly where their care experience is documented. Someone early in their career may genuinely have only one or two employers to offer, which is a different situation from someone with years behind them and nobody to call; the question is worth asking plainly rather than inferring an answer.

Call — don’t text

A text message can be composed, reconsidered, and edited before it’s sent. A phone call carries hesitation, tone, and the pause before an answer, and none of that survives typing. Call every reference, and open with something that can’t be answered in one word: “walk me through what a normal Tuesday looked like” produces a story. “Were they reliable?” produces a single syllable and tells you almost nothing.

Then do the hardest part of the whole call: stay quiet after you ask. The silence will feel much longer to you than it does to them, and the real answer, more often than not, arrives on the far side of it.

The same six questions, every time

These are the same six listed at the top of the page, with what each answer confirms. Once you’ve got someone on the phone, put them in this order — worded exactly the same way you’ll word them for every other reference, so their answers can actually be compared afterward. Three families each drifting through their own version of a conversation produces three things you can’t lay side by side. Six identical questions, asked the same way three times, produce something you actually can.

What matters most, specifically, for care

Beyond the six, a handful of questions matter more here than they would for almost any other kind of hire:

• What actually happened the day someone got sick or hurt. Sooner or later a long arrangement has one. Ask the reference to walk you through that day specifically: what the caregiver noticed first, what they did before calling anyone, and how quickly they called. How they describe it tells you far more about judgment than any general question about reliability.
• Phone and screen habits during quiet stretches — nap time, television time, the drive. This is a fair, ordinary question, and one an honest reference can answer easily.
• How the caregiver handled disagreeing with how the family wanted something done. Did they raise it directly, quietly do it their own way, or never push back on anything at all? You want someone who says it out loud.
• Why the job ended — asked plainly, then left to sit. Many reasons are entirely ordinary, and a reference can usually say so plainly and unprompted. Hesitation, vagueness, or an answer to a different question than the one you asked is telling you something, even when nobody says what.

What you never ask — and what to do if it comes up anyway

Keep every question, of the candidate and of any reference, off age, race, religion, national origin, disability, pregnancy, family or marital status, and medical history. None of it tells you anything about whether this person will do the job well, and asking about it is a genuinely different category of mistake than a clumsy question.

If a reference volunteers any of it unprompted — and occasionally one will, usually meaning no harm by it — don’t write it down, and don’t let it factor into your decision in any direction. Steer the call back to the six questions and move on.

When a reference goes quiet on one question

A reference who talks easily about everything else and then goes quiet on one specific question — often money, hours, or how the job ended — has told you something. People rarely fall silent about a compliment. Note exactly which question produced the pause, and weigh it the way you’d weigh a spoken concern, because functionally it is one.

What to verify, and where

References tell you about character. Verification confirms the facts underneath it, and a short list is worth doing properly every time.

• Identity, from an original document seen in person — not a photo forwarded by text.
• The right to work, confirmed for the role and the place you’re hiring, not assumed from a résumé — and checked the same way for every candidate you consider, never for some and not others.
• A criminal background check, run through a screening service built for the purpose, with written consent obtained first. What consent needs to look like, and what you can and cannot act on afterward, differs by country, state, and city — check what applies where you live before you run anything, and treat this section as general orientation rather than legal instruction.
• A driving record, if the role will ever involve driving your child, your parent, or your car.
• CPR or first-aid certification, confirmed by looking at the physical card yourself and reading the expiration date off it. A certification is an easy thing to assume is current when nobody has actually looked at the date.

A general web search is not a background check. It is fast and it feels thorough, but it cannot tell one person from another person with the same name, and it has no way of telling you whether what it surfaced is current, complete, or about the right individual at all.

The date test that’s easy to skip

A certification that reads current the day you check it can lapse three months into an arrangement nobody expected to run that long. Don’t ask whether it’s current today. Ask whether it will still be current on the date you expect the arrangement to end. If the certification expires before then, that’s a renewal to plan for now, not a surprise to discover later, at the exact moment it would matter most.

A short paid trial, with you there

Once references and verification both check out, pay for a short trial with you home and reachable — not hovering, but present enough to actually see the work. A genuinely ordinary afternoon, with a meal, a nap that doesn’t go to plan, or a small mess, tells you things no phone call ever will, and it costs far less than finding out afterward that you were wrong.

Not legal advice, and not a background-check service

This page is general guidance, not legal advice, and it does not run background checks on your behalf. Consent requirements, what you can act on, and screening rules generally all differ by country, state, and city — confirm what applies where you live before you rely on anything here.

The method, and the workbook that runs it

Doing this well doesn’t require suspicion of every candidate who walks through the door. The point of a structure is the opposite: to be fair to every candidate by asking all of them the same honest questions, in the same order, and checking the same handful of things at the source rather than on trust. You can run the whole method with a phone and a notebook.

The Reference & Vetting Tracker is the paid workbook built around exactly that: the same six probes logged for every reference so their answers can actually be compared, a count of the probes your references disagreed on, and a verification ledger that measures each certificate against the day your arrangement actually ends rather than the day you happened to look. It records what you find; it doesn’t search for anything, and it doesn’t screen anyone.

If the bigger question underneath the hire is which kind of care to arrange at all, the Elder-Care Decision Helper weighs in-home care against the alternatives, and the Medication & Appointment Tracker keeps the day-to-day record once someone is in place. All three sit with the rest of the templates for caregivers.

The hardest part of vetting a care provider

It isn’t the phone calls, and it isn’t the paperwork.

It’s asking the same six questions of the second and third reference after the first one already sounded great. That’s the easiest moment to stop checking — and it’s exactly the moment the comparison starts being worth anything.