The Hiring Process — From Search to Start Date

Before any agency is briefed, the family needs to be clear with itself on what role it is hiring for. This is the step most families skip, and it is the step that determines whether the placement works at month three.

The minimum role specification:

• Function. Cleaner-only ayi, traditional ayi, standard nanny (Tier 3 functional English), bilingual immersion, Tier 4 bilingual / native-English nanny, yuesao, governess. The ayi vs nanny glossary walks through the five role types.
• Hours. Weekly hours, daily schedule, rest day(s), on-call expectations for evenings or weekends, overtime policy.
• Live-in or live-out. If live-in, the room arrangement and whether en-suite is available.
• Language. Tier 1 Mandarin-only / Tier 2 kitchen-level English / Tier 3 functional English / Tier 4 bilingual or native-level. Be honest about what the household actually needs — most families overpay for English fluency they do not use, and most Shanghai ayi sit at Tier 1–2 regardless of how the agency describes them.
• Children. Number, ages, school schedules, any specific needs (food allergies, sleep routines, religious considerations).
• Budget band. Citywide median for your role plus the neighborhood premium, plus or minus your tolerance.
• Start-by date. Realistic, accounting for the 2–4 week hiring process.

The trap most families fall into: writing the spec as if any good candidate will fit. The opposite is true. A well-defined spec narrows the candidate pool but produces dramatically better placements. The salary bands page is the second half of this step — once the role is defined, the budget should follow the bands.

Four realistic sourcing channels in Shanghai. They are not equivalent.

• Licensed staffing agency (direct). Family briefs an agency, agency shortlists from its candidate pool, family interviews 3–5 candidates. Placement fee ¥ 8,000–18,000 paid to the agency by the family. Replacement guarantee typically 30–90 days. Best for first-time placements and for families without strong local references.
• WeChat expat groups and word-of-mouth. Family asks in a neighborhood WeChat group for recommendations, follows up on 2–4 leads. No placement fee. No replacement guarantee. Best for families on their second or third placement who already know what they want.
• Friend-of-friend referral. A specific candidate is recommended by another expat family. Often a candidate whose previous family is leaving Shanghai. No agency layer, but usually no formal background check either. Best when the prior family is someone you trust and the role fit overlaps.
• Family-side advisory (us). We scope the role, brief a curated partner agency, sit in on interviews, draft the contract, and check in at day 7/30/90. Best for families who want the structural alignment of a family-side advisor between them and the staffing agency. See the services page and the about page for the model.

Mixed sourcing is fine. Many families brief one agency plus follow up on 1–2 WeChat-group leads in parallel. What does not work: briefing five agencies simultaneously and hoping the volume produces a winner. The good candidates are exclusive to one agency at a time, and agencies notice when their candidate is also being shopped through three competitors.

Once the agency or referral channel has surfaced candidates, the family receives 3–5 candidate profiles. A typical profile includes: age, hometown, years of experience, prior families (anonymized), languages, certifications, salary expectation, availability, photo.

The first conversation is a 20–30 minute screening call, ideally on WeChat video. The purpose is to confirm the basics — language ability, schedule compatibility, salary alignment — and to see how the candidate carries herself outside the agency's framing.

A few things to do on the screening call:

• Ask the candidate to describe a recent day with her last family. The level of detail tells you whether she ran the day or whether she followed someone else's instructions.
• Ask why she left the last family. Listen for the rhythm of the answer; what she chooses to mention and what she doesn't are both signals.
• Confirm her language ability against the household's actual need (see the bilingual premium discussion). Many candidates inflate English on the agency profile.
• Confirm her schedule expectations — rest day, on-call evenings, weekend cover. Misalignment here at week one becomes a contract dispute at month two.
• Confirm her salary expectation. If she is 15%+ over your budget, the conversation ends here. If she is 15%+ under, ask why — it sometimes signals an issue.

Typical outcome of the screening round: 1–2 of the 3–5 candidates drop out for misalignment; 2–3 advance to the structured interview.

The structured interview is 60–90 minutes, in person at the family's home (or on video if the candidate cannot travel that day). The agency representative attends with the candidate; the family side attends with both parents where possible.

A structured interview means: written question set, same questions for every candidate, notes captured during the interview, scored after. The structure matters because human interviewers without a template will hire the candidate they liked most rather than the candidate who actually fit the role best.

Our recommended question structure, divided into five blocks of 10–15 minutes each:

• Block 1 — daily routine. "Walk me through a typical day with the family you worked for before." Listen for ownership of the schedule, specificity, and the kind of decisions she made without instruction.
• Block 2 — child-handling scenarios. Three scenarios — feeding refusal, sleep regression, sibling conflict. "What would you do if X happened?" Listen for proportionality and instinct.
• Block 3 — language demonstration. Read a 200-word picture book aloud (or have her read it). For bilingual roles, switch between English and Mandarin mid-conversation. The discomfort of the switch is informative.
• Block 4 — household-fit questions. Food, screen time, discipline philosophy, religious considerations, gift-giving conventions, red-envelope expectations.
• Block 5 — candidate's questions back to the family. A candidate who has no questions has either done this many times (good) or is not engaged (bad). The questions she asks reveal what she cares about.

The interview kit PDF contains the full question set in English and Mandarin (phonetic transcript), the scoring rubric, and the red-flag list. Download it before any structured interview.

Typical outcome: 1–2 candidates advance from structured interview to trial day.

A paid trial day (sometimes a paid trial week) is the single highest-leverage step in the whole process. The candidate spends a day in the family's home doing the actual job — managing the schedule, interacting with the child, navigating the family's rhythm — and both sides get a vastly more accurate signal than any interview could produce.

Standard trial-day structure:

• 6–10 hours, paid at a per-day rate roughly equivalent to (monthly salary ÷ 22). For a ¥ 13,000/month standard nanny, the trial-day rate is ¥ 590 (round to ¥ 600).
• The family is at home for some of the day and out for the rest. Both signals matter — supervised behavior and unsupervised behavior.
• One of the family's existing routines is in scope (school pickup, dinner prep, bath routine). Don't manufacture an artificial day.
• Debrief at the end with the candidate. "What was hardest? What would you do differently if this were a regular day?" The honesty of her self-assessment is a strong signal.

For live-in placements specifically, some families do a paid 3-day trial — Friday evening to Monday morning — where the candidate stays in the live-in room and the family experiences the full structure. This is heavier to organize but reduces the live-in placement failure rate substantially.

What the trial day will not reveal: how the candidate behaves at month three when the novelty has worn off. That is what the day 7/30/90 check-ins are for. But the trial day will reveal misfit, which is the more common reason placements fail in the first 60 days.

Reference and background checks happen in parallel with the trial day, not after. The candidate is committing time to a trial; the agency should be committing time to reference work.

What "reference and background check" actually covers in the Shanghai context:

• Identity verification. Agency confirms 身份证 and (where relevant) 户口本. Family does not handle these documents directly.
• Prior-employer references. Agency calls at least two prior employers in the candidate's language. We ask for the substance of the reference notes — generic "she was good" notes get flagged and re-pulled. A reference call that lasts 5 minutes tells you nothing; a reference call that lasts 15–25 minutes with specific anecdotes is meaningful.
• Police-record certificate (无犯罪记录证明). Available in China but requires home-province cooperation. Realistic timeline 2–4 weeks. For families who want it, brief the agency at signing; for families who don't, the reference-check substitute is usually adequate.
• Health certificate (健康证). Standard for food-handling. For newborn-care roles, add a pre-employment medical including hepatitis and TB screening.
• Credential verification. Yuesao certificates and 育婴师 certifications can be verified against the issuing body's database. The background-check page covers which certifications are real, which are paper.

What the reference check cannot tell you: how the candidate will handle your specific family's idiosyncrasies. That is what the trial day is for. The reference is verifying baseline competence and identity, not fit.

Once the trial day has gone well and references have come back clean, the contract is drafted. Even for cash arrangements, a written bilingual contract is the minimum standard for any placement — not because Chinese household-employment law strictly requires one, but because the contract is the document that prevents disputes at month four.

The eight essential clauses every Shanghai nanny contract needs:

• Salary, payment date, currency.
• Hours, rest days, on-call expectations.
• Sick leave and statutory holidays.
• Annual leave and golden-week treatment.
• Termination notice and severance.
• Confidentiality and household privacy.
• Bonus and annual review.
• Dispute resolution and governing language.

The contract is bilingual — Chinese on the left page, English on the right. The Chinese side is the governing language if there is a dispute, because the candidate may not read English. The English side is for the family. They must say the same thing.

Families new to Shanghai often want to add clauses imported from London or New York contracts — non-competes, drug-testing clauses, social-media restrictions. Most of these don't translate cleanly into Chinese civil-contract law and either become unenforceable or send a signal of distrust at signing. The contract essentials page covers what works and what doesn't.

Signing is typically in person, with the agency representative present. Both copies are signed; both parties keep one; the agency retains a copy if they are mediating payroll.

The start date is when most families think the work is over. It is when the most important work begins. The first 30 days set the rhythm for the entire placement; misalignments not addressed in the first month become permanent.

The minimum check-in cadence:

• Day 1. Family briefing — household rules, food, screen time, sleep routine, who picks up from school on which days, where the medical kit is, how to reach the parents. Written summary in both languages.
• Day 7. Sit-down with the candidate. "What's working? What's not? What did you expect that's different?" The agency or family-side advisor should be on this call where possible.
• Day 30. Formal check-in. Either the placement is going well and you continue, or there are issues to recalibrate, or you exercise the probation-period termination clause. The contract essentials page covers the probation-period structure.
• Day 90. Second formal check-in. Most placements that survive to day 90 survive to year one and beyond.

The single most common failure mode: family lets the first 30 days drift, candidate develops habits that don't fit the household, and by day 60 the family is frustrated and the candidate doesn't understand what changed. Mitigation is calendar-based: the day 7, 30, 90 check-ins are non-negotiable, and they go on the calendar before the start date.

The communication and culture page covers how to run the conversation when something is not working without damaging the relationship. The firing and transition page covers what to do if the placement isn't working and needs to end.