Finding childcare through your employer

It is amazing how hard it is to find childcare. There are a lot of Facebook groups to find nannies and babysitters. We had been looking for babysitters there but there is high rate of people showing initial interest and then disappearing for a week. We cannot hire someone like that to watch our son.

We decided we should signup with care.com or sittercity.com. However, my colleague reminded that our employer, IBM, has some sort of program to find childcare. That’s when we discovered that IBM indeed has really great options for this. We talked to some of our friends at other companies and turns out pretty much all much employers provide a lot of great options to find childcare. Here three different options that many employers provide.

Daycares

A lot of employers have discount deals with major daycare chains and independent daycares. We get up to 10% discount.

Babysitters or Nannies

There are various types of options here:

Free memberships

We get free membership to sittercity.com to search for babysitters or nannies. Some friends had access to other internal tools for this.

Nanny Placement

While you can search for nannies on sittercity.com, you will need to interview, run background checks, etc. You can hire a Nanny Placement agency that will handle all the initial interview and vetting process for you. They usually charge $1000+. We get 30% or up to $300 off placement fees and found similar discounts at our friends companies.

Day Camps

Again another option for childcare. Many employers have 20-30% discount deals with various day camps.

Emergency Backup Care

This is a life saver. My company subsidize cost of emergency childcare during work hours. Total out of pocket cost for in-home babysitter is $6/hour for us for up to 25 days a year. Our friends also had similar deals. Some friends didn’t had restrictions that it was for only during work hours. So they can use their service for date night etc.