u/BackdoorDan

We've had a few interviews already and are getting the hang of it. For reference, we have interviewed 3 au pairs from cultural care, all who had level 4 english.

Sometimes the language barrier can be a little bit challenging though. I'm not necessarily worried about it when the aupair is here because being immersed in the language will probably get them ramped up quickly and being able to use gestures in person will make things easier to communicate but it's a little bit challenging to figure out things in the interview(eg. what do you like to do for fun yields very basic responses because they can't express themselves well in English).

How did you get to know an aupair over a video call if their English was limited?

Did you guys mostly use chat to ask questions and use a video call for a more personable experience?

How challenging would communication have to be before you disqualified an aupair?

Hi all, we're a HF currently signed up with cultural care. I saw on this subreddit there were quite a few other agencies people talk about(aupairworld, aupairusa, etc...).

What are the main differences between these agencies? Should i just be signed up to all of them for my search or what?

Hi all,

I'm currently in the search for an aupair for our baby. I've found the cultural care website and app to be among the worst experiences for filtering and searching I have ever come across.

You can't ctrl+f since it's a flutter app, the profile pages have information hidden behind clicks, when you are filtering you don't see the same au pairs(they hide au pairs that have reached their chat maximum), and the list goes on...

It is incredibly time intensive to walk through 80+ profiles to look for the ones that match my criteria... it would be ideal if I could sort by my criteria and view them in that order.

I took some time to understand their api and built a tool to get all of the au pair information from my searches and feed it through some code to find information I'm interested in so I can sort au pairs based on what I care about(eg. we live in an outdoorsy area so I want to find au pairs that mention nature, the outdoors, or have photos of them enjoying nature).

I'm not going to create an app to do this since it would likely violate cultural care's ToS so for now it's just a tool you install and set up yourself. It's totally free(except for ~$2 you'd spend on anthropic api tokens for the photo analysis) and open source, I'm not trying to make money, I'm just trying to help others make better matches. The usage of the tool is slightly technical, most of it is done through the command line so I wanted to invite any other technically inclined HFs that want to check it out... I'd give it to one or two HF's to work out any kinks then I'll make another post so everyone else can enjoy it. Shoot me a DM if interested!

As an aside, if there are any cultural care reps on here and you think this tool would be useful for you, shoot me a DM as well. With the company's permission, I could build this in a way that non technical people could use if your engineers set up something like oauth that I could leverage. With oauth people could get a session token without having to pass a username/password through me which would be a big security no-no(this is honestly the main reason why I'm not creating an app for it, there's no secure way to do it).

DISCLAIMER: yes, this is AI slop... not sure how else I'm supposed to build something like this with a 25 day old keeping me sleep deprived lol. I am a software dev with over 15 years of experience though so I feel pretty good about being able to supervise claude code and build something that is useful and secure.

Also, sorry to the au pairs that would like this tool for host families, I don't have access to what the website looks like for au pairs so I can't build the same for you :(

Hi there, hf in the United States. It's our first child and she will be 6 months old when the au pair joins us.

We only started interviewing this week and met an au pair we liked and want to do another interview. One thing holding us back a little bit is that she has acrylic nails which are less hygienic based on some research we found. It normally wouldn't be an issue but with such a young baby with an underdeveloped immune system I think it's a deal breaker.

I am fully aware that this is a pretty weird criteria so I don't really know how to proceed. For stuff like this is it typical to bring it up and say "we like you but we wouldn't want you using acrylic nails with our baby" or is it more typical to say we aren't a match and just move on... I don't want anyone to feel like we are controlling their sense of individuality but this is our first time doing these interviews so I don't know what the au pairs would prefer.