Nanny agency vs. hiring on your own: 20 things to consider to choose what is best for your family

You contact an agency. Within a day you get three profiles on WhatsApp. You arrange the interviews yourself, you decide who to hire, you agree the terms, and from that moment you are on your own. If it does not work out in week five, they send three more.

That is not an agency. It is an introduction service, and there is nothing wrong with calling it that, except almost nobody does. The word agency implies somebody checked, somebody is responsible, and somebody will still be there if something goes wrong. In this market, most of the time, none of those three are true.

So the useful question is not only whether to use a nanny agency or hire on your own. It is what each route actually gives you, what it leaves to you, and how to tell, before you pay anyone, which kind of agency you are talking to.

Totters was founded by Montserrat Armesto, a pedagogue and specialist in child neuropsychology, for parents who want to be deeply present and deeply ambitious. We have spent ten years on the other side of this conversation, which means we know exactly which questions an introduction service cannot answer. Our in-home nanny program exists because sending profiles was never the difficult part.

What a nanny agency should be doing that you cannot do alone

This is the clearest way to think about it. You can interview. You can call a reference. You can read a person across a table as well as anyone.

What you cannot easily do, in a country you arrived in recently, is the rest of it. You cannot run a background check on someone in a system you do not know. You cannot tell whether a training centre on a certificate is real. You cannot compare this candidate against two hundred others you have assessed. You cannot supervise her in month seven, because by then you are her employer and her friend and the only person she reports to, which are three roles that undermine each other. And you cannot cover Monday when she wakes up ill.

Those five things are the entire value of an agency. An organisation that only does introductions is charging you for the one part of this you were already capable of doing yourself.

If you hire on your own, where do families look?

Hiring on your own is a real option, and plenty of families do it well. The usual routes are recommendations from a neighbour, a building administrator, a school or another expat family, and online platforms where caregivers create their own profiles, such as Sitly and Cronoshare.

These routes are good at one thing: putting candidates in front of you quickly and at low cost. What they do not do is verify, match, supervise or cover. That is all yours, and the 20 things below will show you how much of it there is. If you would rather skip the trouble, that is exactly what we do, and we will tell you honestly whether what you need is an agency at all.

20 things to consider before you decide

These are written as questions to ask of an agency and, just as usefully, to ask of yourself if you are planning to hire on your own. For each one, notice who ends up carrying it. If the honest answer is "me, with no experience of this country's systems", that is information about the route, not about you.

Verification and trust

1. What exactly was verified about this candidate, and can you see it? A real answer is specific and boring: background check, references called and by whom, identity confirmed, first aid certification checked with the issuing institution rather than photographed. A CV service will tell you their caregivers are carefully selected, which is a sentence, not a process. Ask what selected means and watch what happens.

2. Was the certificate checked with the institution that issued it? Anyone can print one, and with no national registry to check against, the paper on its own proves only that paper exists. The question is not whether someone has seen it. It is whether they called.

3. Is anything assessed beyond experience? Experience is the easiest thing to claim and the least predictive of how someone behaves in a difficult ten minutes. Reliability assessments exist in Mexico and are widely used for positions of trust. Every Totter completes one that is validated for the Mexican population, read by someone qualified to interpret it. It is not a verdict on anyone. It is a layer of objective information in a decision most households make on impression alone.

4. Who calls the references, and which number do they use? Calling yourself is fine, and you should, using a number you found where you can rather than only the one you were handed. Ask what kind of family she would not be right for. The harder part is knowing what a vague answer means in a country where you do not yet know how people talk about each other.

5. How many other candidates has this person been compared against? One candidate interviewed over coffee tells you about one person. A team that has assessed hundreds knows what a strong profile looks like and what an average one hides.

Matching and the hiring process

6. How many candidates will you be sent? Counterintuitively, a long list is the bad answer. Ten profiles means nobody filtered anything and the work has been handed back to you in bulk. Matching is a different exercise from placement: somebody understood your household, your hours, your child's temperament and what you will not compromise on, then chose one or two people who actually fit.

7. Did anyone ask about your child before sending profiles? If nobody has asked how old he is, how he handled the move, what your week looks like and what your non-negotiables are, then nothing was matched to anything. Hiring on your own, this is the question you have to ask yourself before the first interview.

8. How much time can you give the search? Posting, screening messages, scheduling interviews, calling references, running trial days. It is easily dozens of hours, and it tends to happen in the same weeks you are settling a household and starting school. Time is a cost, even when no invoice carries it.

9. Will the agreement exist in writing? Everything happening over WhatsApp, with no agreement, no scope and no defined terms, means nothing to refer back to when something goes wrong. Whichever route you choose, put hours, tasks, pay, absences and notice on paper. Our guide to hiring a nanny in Mexico covers the terms that need to be written down before anyone starts.

10. Who handles administration? With us, salary, contracts and administration are managed for you.

After the placement

11. Who supervises her once she starts? This is the question that ends most conversations, and it is the most important one on the list. A placement without supervision means that from day one the only person monitoring quality is you, in your own home, about someone your child has grown attached to. If the standard slips in month seven, you will notice late, and by then raising it has become a confrontation rather than an adjustment.

12. Where does she take a concern that is not you? A caregiver with nowhere to go with a worry either absorbs it until she resigns, or brings it to you at the worst possible moment. A coordination team gives her somewhere to say it.

13. What happens on a Monday when she cannot come? Everyone plans for the ordinary week and almost nobody plans for this one. "We will try to find someone" is not coverage. Substitute coverage means a vetted caregiver who is briefed on your household rather than a stranger arriving cold at eight in the morning, arranged before it is needed rather than during.

14. What happens if the match is wrong? Listen for whether the answer is about replacing a person or understanding what went wrong. A service that immediately offers three more profiles has no idea why the first one failed and no way of avoiding the same failure twice. Ask, too, what happens to the caregiver. An organisation that treats caregivers as interchangeable will treat your child's relationship with her the same way.

15. Who carries the awkward conversations? Schedule changes, raises, advances, a concern about how something was handled. Those exchanges create friction when they happen directly between you and the person your child adores, and most parents avoid them until avoidance has done real damage. When a coordination team holds them, the friction stays outside your home and the warmth stays inside it.

Cost, fit and your own situation

16. What are you actually paying for? Compare the whole picture, not the headline number. An introduction fee covers the introduction. Placement with supervision, training and cover is a different product, and it is only fair to compare like with like.

17. Is there a plan for your child, or only supervision? A developmental plan matters because it is what turns supervision into care, and because without one the day gets filled rather than planned. Ongoing training matters because child development knowledge moves, and a caregiver relying on what she was taught a decade ago will be doing something well that is no longer the best answer available.

18. Will she stay? Knowing there is a team investing in your development, covering for you when you cannot come and backing you when something is difficult is the difference between a job and a profession. It is the clearest reason professionals stay for years rather than months, and a caregiver who stays is worth more to your child than any hiring process.

19. How long do you need this, and for which stage? A newborn, an ongoing arrangement for the school year, and a defined season are three different needs. For a newborn, specialised infant care is its own service, and for a defined season our short-term and temporary option covers it without a long commitment.

20. How many roles are you willing to hold? If you hire on your own, you will be her employer, her day to day manager, her friend and the only person she reports to. Those are roles that undermine each other. It is worth deciding, before the first day, whether you want all of them.

What to do with all this

Take the questions to whoever you are considering, including us. An organisation that is doing the work will answer them in detail and without hesitating, because the answers are just a description of their week. An organisation that is forwarding CVs will get vague around question eleven and stay vague.

On our side, a placement includes the full screening, the reliability assessment, deliberate matching rather than a list, a personalised developmental plan for your child, ongoing training and professional supervision of the caregiver, substitute coverage when she cannot come, and our team carrying the conversations that create friction inside a household.

We work with families across the country, whether you are in Mexico City, settling into Monterrey, Nuevo León, or finding your footing in Guadalajara, and we will tell you honestly whether what you need is an agency at all.

Book your private consultation today.