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Au Pair Screening and Fluffy Personality Tests

The most important role of au pair agencies is to ensure that the au pairs they provide are suitable for the job and trustworthy. This is done by selecting au pairs through interviews, reference checks, background checks, and personality tests.

Au pair agencies in the US are required by federal regulations to use personality tests as part of the Au Pair selection process. Personality tests are important because no single screening method is 100% accurate, and combining multiple tools is the only way to increase the overall accuracy of pre-employment screening.

This is why:

Interviews often fail to reveal important facts or problematic personality traits, and their predictive value is limited, even when conducted by properly trained interviewers. In a recent case involving a nanny adoption scam, the mother who interviewed her said, “She seemed like a great person, very eloquent, very intelligent, she seemed so caring and personable…she sounded like a textbook “. , great nanny for me. Just perfect.” The “successful interview” was not the only point of failure in the selection process. The nanny was hired through a national website that connects parents with local babysitters and babysitters, had experience with babies and children small and reportedly passed a criminal background check with flying colors.

· Referrals are highly subjective. How valuable is the opinion of someone you don’t know? What are their expectations, values, standards? In another recent case, a live-in nanny was arrested on child pornography charges 5 months after being hired through a well-known full-service nanny agency. According to the parents, “the agency provided excellent job references.”

· Background screening is extremely important but full of loopholes. The scope, timeliness, and accuracy of the various databases consulted may be limited. For example, a nanny was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol, with her children, ages 2 and 8, in the car. Several months later, the babysitter’s profile was still showing up on another national website that matches parents with babysitters, as her original background check showed no offense. Also, every felon doesn’t have a criminal record until her first offense (or, in fact, her first conviction). Will this first offense harm her children?

Personality tests were made mandatory for the selection of au pairs in the US following cases such as that of Louise Woodward, a young English au pair convicted of the involuntary manslaughter of an eight-month-old baby who died of Down syndrome. shaken baby, and another case of a Swiss Au pair who escaped from a burning house without trying to save the 3-month-old baby she was caring for.

These tests provide valuable additional information about the au pair’s character and personality traits and can highlight issues that are very difficult to identify through an interview, such as trouble performing under pressure or a tendency toward violent behavior. The importance of personality tests as an au pair selection tool is increasing, as interviews are less effective once conducted over the phone rather than face-to-face, and the databases used for background screening in many countries are often not of the same quality as those. used in the US

Has the mandatory personality test requirement improved au pair selection? Not necessarily.

Some Au Pair agencies in the US seem to be using inappropriate personality tests. According to Ilona Bray, “Any Au Pair agency can take a fluffy personality test off the internet that has nothing to do with childcare and give it to candidates and still meet the standards.” (Nannies and Au Pairs, In-Home Child Care Hiring, USA Today, 2010).

At least some Au Pair agencies seem to compromise on the quality of testing, in an effort to comply with federal regulation at minimal cost. One of the tests used by au pair agencies is the Booraem-Flores Au Pair Psychometric Test, which is limited to answering whether an au pair is likely to lose emotional control under stress or is more likely to make poor safety judgments when under stress. When asked about a more comprehensive test of personality attributes, Dr. Flowers, co-author of the test, replied, “It would be possible to do a test for these positive attributes, but it would be difficult and expensive to develop.” He had a similar response related to producing a report that could be shown to parents: “The problem is that the cost of the evaluation would increase considerably if individualized reports were generated.”

In fact, cost is an issue for many parents, and raising children is a significant financial burden. But compromising the safety and well-being of our children by accepting less than optimal screening tests, just to save a few bucks, can have disastrous consequences and cannot be accepted. Additionally, the use of proper personality tests can reduce the chances of a rematch and the associated costs.

Not all personality tests are the same and one has to use the right type of test. Risk analysis, which highlights possible risk factors, is an extremely important component of personality tests. For example, NannyTest covers the following: Violent Behavior, Drug Abuse, Drinking Problems, Truthful Reporting, Respect for Property, and more. In addition, the test assesses personality traits such as responsibility, obedience and discipline, self-control, emotional stability, coping with pressure, positive attitude, and service awareness.

To protect our children, we must ensure that the caregiver selection process is the best it can be. Parents should demand that quality personality tests be used as part of the caregiver selection process. If the agency does not perform adequate personality tests, or if the agency is unwilling to share the test report, parents can easily perform them on their own. Relevant personality tests like NannyTest are now available online for all parents, easy to use and very affordable.

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