Pros
- It is possible to find families to work for that need you and appreciate you, that you wouldn't have been able to find without College Nanies. That being said, it's up to the individual to try out as many families/placements as it takes to find that awesome fit between a nanny (you) & a family. - Being a placement nanny is pretty great (when you end up in a placement with a family you like) because you can basically tell CN&T what kind of hours you are looking for, and they will try to find families that need a nanny for that many hours per week for you to interview with. - Having a company go between you and a new family is really great when you compare it to finding jobs through craigslist or something similar, because the manager has already met with the family, so there is less awkwardness and less chance of a dangerous/weird/uncomfortable situation when you go to interview with a potential placement family. - You technically work for (and get a paycheck from) CN&T, which is good because they have some type of liability insurance that you would never be able to pay for yourself, and they take care of the money/taxes/paychecks issues for you.
Cons
The management sucks! The manager I worked under (+ her office staff) was not very organized, and, quite frankly, actually quite discriminatory. 1) They give the nannies the least amount of money they can. That means that: - they will intentionally not give you enough hours to get full-time/over-time benefits; - they will not help you move up and make more money per hour (there is a system for applying for raises, but they do not encourage anyone to do it or explain the process well enough); - and they quite literally choose who gets to work on-call jobs based on how much money they will have to pay the nanny---meaning, if there is one spot left to work at a church on a Sunday morning and two ppl have said they would like the job, they will staff the nanny who makes less money per hour. It's like, upside-down seniority. The MORE experience you have and the BETTER nanny you are (the more your per hour rate is), the LESS they will actually staff you for jobs. 2) The on-call system is terrible! As a nanny, you are extremely inconvenienced constantly and you get essentially no monetary benefits from being "on-call" because the amount of hours you might get in a week is totally unpredictable (I mean TOTALLY) and you get no bonus for the time you say you are "available" or "on call". - Basically, every nanny has to submit their "availability" ahead of time and be able to answer their phone at any hour of the day or night to respond to job-scheduling text messages from the manager, which creates some really bad situations. - e.g. Let's say you put on the scheduler five days ago that you would be free on Thursday afternoon after 2pm, but since you didn't get any on-call placements, you decide to go get a haircut on Thursday afternoon at 2pm and schedule the appt on Thursday morning. Well, if you get a text on Thursday at 1pm saying there is no one else to take a job that is across town, you are expected to drop everything and go do the job. If you posted that you are available, you are obliged to do the job if you are absolutely needed. - To reiterate, you don't get any base pay per hour for the time you are "on-call" (and not actually working), and the VAST majority of the time, you will not be staffed for jobs during the times you've said you are available. So, you have to carve out A LOT of "on-call" time (when you can't schedule anything else in your life), and then most of the time, you don't get ANYTHING out of it.