Nowadays many people working in care register with a childcare recruitment agency that specialise in their childcare interests. Prospective employers can approach agencies who have screened candidates and this can make the recruitment process and matching easier. Other options include placing a advert in the local paper or on a childcare recruitment website.
Interviewing for a Childcarer
When considering care for your child while on holiday or due to career commitments, there are a number of factors to think about. These may include:
- The age of your child
- The character, culture and language of your child / family
- The child’s developmental needs (do they have special needs?)
- The legal requirements for childcare
- The financial afford
- The duration of care
- The location of care provision
- The types of duties required
These factors are important in deciding on the type of care required and the skill set and experience of the carer. Likewise, those in the childcare profession need to think about factors that are important to them in their job role to find the right employment match.
Interviewing childcare candidates
Whatever method of finding a childcarer is used, there are interviewing techniques that can be used to assess candidate suitability. These interview techniques include:
- Shortlist candidates based on qualifications, experiences and references provided
- Create a list of relevant questions to use in phone interview, such as further details on qualifications, training, experiences and competencies, and questions to explore further in face-to-face interview
- Identifying if the candidate is registered on the Ofsted vGCR or GCR, and if they have an enhanced CRB check
- Meet with the candidate to discuss their feelings about their work, the environment, the level of care that they will be expected to care for
- Discuss hours of work, flexibility, holidays, sickness, probation and pay rates
- Lastly, allow the child to meet the candidate to work on an exercise to see if the match is right
Useful questions to ask child care candidates
The usual questions may include: “How long have you worked in childcare? Why do you choose to work in childcare? What activities have you done as a childcarer? What age groups have you worked with?” and so on. However, asking questions that require critical thinking responses and in-depth information on how the childcarer may react in certain circumstances can give vital feedback on their own behavioural patterns. Such questions may include:
- Give an example of a challenging child you have worked with, and how your resolved the issue.
- Give an example of a problem with a parent that you experienced and what you did about it.
- What do you enjoy most and least about working in childcare?
- What do you think are your particular strengths and weaknesses are when working with children?
- What discipline strategies do you use if a child misbehaves?
- What are your plans as a childcarer for the future?
