About ShanghaiNanny — Curated, Transparent, independent

What we are: an independent placement-and-advisory resource for expat families in Shanghai. We work in English and Mandarin. We operate from Shanghai, with partner-agency relationships across the city. We charge a flat advisory fee, paid by the family, scoped to the placement.

What we are not:

• Not a licensed Shanghai staffing agency. Licensed agencies hold a 人力资源服务许可证 and operate under specific labor-bureau regulations. We do not. Partner agencies in our network do.
• Not the employer of any nanny. When a placement happens, the family is the employer (or the family contracts through a partner-agency payroll arrangement). We are neither.
• Not a marketplace. There is no candidate-listing page on this site. We do not publish nanny profiles. Candidate matching happens privately, through partner agencies, on a per-family basis.
• Not a 24-hour-match service. A real placement takes 2–4 weeks. We say so on every page.

We work with a deliberately small set of partner agencies — currently four in active rotation across Shanghai's main expat districts. They were chosen against criteria we publish:

• Minimum five years operating in Shanghai under the same license.
• Documented identity and prior-employer reference-check procedures we can audit.
• Replacement guarantee in writing — typically 30–90 days.
• English-or-bilingual point of contact who can communicate with the family directly.
• No referral kickbacks that distort which candidates get prioritized.

We audit each partner quarterly. Audits look at: candidate-pool freshness, time-to-shortlist for our briefs, placement-survival rates at day 30 / 90 / 365, and family-side complaint patterns. A partner who slips below threshold on any of those metrics gets paused. Two partners have been paused since we started auditing in 2024; one returned to active rotation after remediation, one did not.

Families do not need to know which specific agency we used on their placement — but if you ask, we will tell you, and you can speak with that agency directly. We do not get a kickback if you go to them again next time.

Think of us as the family-side advisor in a transaction where the partner agency is the candidate-side sourcer. In a traditional staffing-agency model, one entity sits on both sides — they source the candidate, they place her, they collect from the family. The structural incentive is to close placements fast, even when the fit is borderline.

We split those roles deliberately. Partner agencies are paid for sourcing and verification. We are paid by the family for advisory, contracting, and post-placement support. Our fee does not increase if the placement closes faster. Our fee does not decrease if the placement takes a third interview round. That structural alignment is the whole point.

We don't run background checks ourselves — our partner agencies do, and we audit their methods. That's the line. Here is what that actually looks like in practice.

• Identity verification. Partner agencies confirm the candidate's 身份证 (national ID) and 户口本 (household-registration book where relevant). We do not handle these documents ourselves. We do verify with the agency that they have, on file, copies of both before any introduction to the family.
• Prior-employer references. Partner agencies call at least two prior employers in the candidate's language. We ask for the agency's reference notes and review them for substance — generic "she was good" notes get flagged and re-pulled.
• Police record checks. A 无犯罪记录证明 (no-criminal-record certificate) is technically obtainable in China but takes time and depends on the candidate's home-province cooperation. For roles where families want it, we work with the partner agency to obtain it before the start date. The realistic timeline is 2–4 weeks.
• Health screening. A 健康证 (food/hygiene health certificate) is standard for any candidate handling food. For newborn-care roles we recommend a fuller pre-employment medical including hepatitis and TB screening.
• Credential verification. Yuesao and childcare certificates exist at many credibility tiers. We tell families which certifications are real, which are paper, and which are worth paying a premium for. See yuesao placement for the credential ladder.

What we don't pretend to do: criminal-history searches in the candidate's home province conducted by us directly; international background checks for foreign-national candidates; document forensics on submitted certificates. Those are outside our skill and our license.

We charge a flat advisory fee per placement, billed to the family. Fees vary by placement complexity:

• Standard placement (live-in or live-out full-time, no specialist requirements): ¥ 12,000, billed half at contract signing and half on day 30 after start.
• Bilingual immersion or specialist placement: ¥ 18,000, same payment schedule.
• Yuesao + ongoing ayi handoff: ¥ 20,000, billed half at yuesao signing and half at ayi start date.
• Replacement search (if first placement ends within 90 days through no fault of the family): subsidized at 50% of the original fee.
• 20-minute initial call: free, no obligation, no upsell at the end. We will tell you if your situation is one where you should hire directly or work with a partner agency you found yourself.

We do not take kickbacks from partner agencies. The partner agencies in our rotation have a separate placement fee that the family pays them directly, which is the same fee they would charge if you'd gone to them without us. We do not mark up. We do not get a finder's commission.

Mike (mikewuchina@gmail.com) is the curator and operator. He runs ShanghaiNanny alongside a portfolio of advisory desks across Anglo expat-family verticals — relocations, schooling, household services, and a small set of B2B sites in adjacent niches.

The credibility claim is narrow and honest: he has worked the placement workflow on the family side, in Shanghai and across the broader Anglo-expat-family network, since 2019. He speaks working English and Mandarin sufficient to sit in on a candidate interview and follow the substance. He does not present as a licensed labor-law practitioner — he reads contracts, drafts standard clauses, and refers families to a Shanghai-licensed lawyer for any disputed termination or anything involving social-insurance back-payment.

The larger network includes a New Zealand travel-planning desk, a technical-SEO consultancy, several food-science B2B sites, and a programmatic-content infrastructure that funds the advisory work on this site. None of those overlap with the placement work — they fund the independence. ShanghaiNanny is not VC-backed, does not have an exit, and is not optimized for volume. It is optimized for the families we already work with telling the next family they should call us.