UPDATE: The CEO of SitterCity.com has weighed in on this incident. Please scroll down and read the first comment to this post.
Many companies ignore issues like this one when they hit the blog world, but this was clearly not the case with SitterCity - we applaud them for contacting us and letting us know their side of the story.
The ‘Net might be a good place to find a date or grab that odd tchochke off E-bay, but it might not be the best place to go when looking for a nanny to take care of your kids.
That’s what the parents of a 13-month-old boy from Cherokee County, Georgia found out this week, when their nanny-cam caught 23-year-old nanny Constance Smith slapping, pinching, and pushing the child to the ground.
Where did Mom and Dad find this charming young woman from? Why a Web-based nanny service called SitterCity.com.
Now SitterCity’s site claims to have a four-step screening process and background checks and all that good stuff, but obviously something slipped through the cracks here.
The problem with SitterCity is that from the outside, it looks like great pains will be taken to ensure the identity and background of the sitter/nanny, but in reality, it is very easy for anyone to sign up for an account and offer their services.After you sign up to be a caregiver, you’re encouraged to have a background check completed on you, but it’s not a requirement to place a profile on the site. It is not clear if Constance Smith had a background check on her portfolio or not. Running a check on yourself incurs an additional charge - otherwise, it is free to post your information.
The Rockmart, Georgia woman is charged with Cruelty to Children, and is free after posting bond.
SitterCity has not responded to local media attempts to get in contact with them.
More information:
1 comment so far ↓
I wanted to reply personally to your blog entry as it mentions my company, Sittercity.com.
Sittercity takes safety incredibly seriously. We have a detailed four-step screening process that parents can conduct on sitters, including references, parent feedback, an interview process, and background checks. We also have a team dedicated to ensuring the safety and security of our site as well as third party security scans and proprietary software to prevent abuse of our service. No matter how you find a sitter, it’s important to check in on how they are doing even after they start working with your family. We provide information about this on the site and in addition we’ve made numerous appearances in the national media to discuss various approaches to monitoring how your sitter is doing, including options like the nanny cam which worked in this situation.
As soon as the allegation was reported to us, we immediately took action and terminated the sitter account in question. We have reached out to assist local law enforcement and have spoken to the child’s family to express our sympathy and support. As a further precaution, we reached out to our competitors to alert them of the issue.
The sitter in question has been an active sitter in the Atlanta area for over nine years, long before she joined Sittercity. She has her own, very popular, babysitting web site. Therefore, we were shocked as well as saddened by the allegations against her. We have never had a similar issue to this one since we started business in 2001 and our entire team is dedicated to preventing anything like this from happening again.
The Atlanta affiliate that ran the story you saw did not properly contact Sittercity or leave a message, so we could not reply to them before they ran the piece. As soon as we heard that they had run the piece, we responded to them within minutes and continued to contact them hourly. Due to the holiday, their reporter and webmaster were unavailable and it took until this morning before they finally retracted and corrected their statement that we were non-responsive.
Please see their revised story with our statement included:
http://www.wsbtv.com/news/14938393/detail.html
If I can do anything further to address your concerns, please feel free to contact me using the information below.
Sincerely,
Genevieve Thiers
CEO
Sittercity, Inc.
gthiers@sittercity.com
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