Care.comReviews 12,031

This site really needs to require people posting jobs to have a Premium account.
The problem I see is that they let potential employers post a job ( I guess to try to hook and bait them), but the same potential employers must first upgrade to a premium account to see application messages that I've replied to them with.
This is ridiculous as 90% of my messages are 'delivered', yet never read or seen. If I'm paying you for my premium account monthly, then I want to at least know my messages are being seen. I understand it's my responsibility to follow up on messages but at least give us a higher percentage of messages seen.
Stop Letting People Without Premium Accounts Post Jobs! I'm betting the site would be a lot more effective!

I am an employer that has hired childcare from care.com for years on and off. I recently had a childcare provider that I hired for a date night eat our food, sit on her phone ignoring our child and then get rough and irritated with her when she cried. I freaked out seeing this on nannie cam and we rushed home having to take our newly arrived dinner home. We paid her and asked her to leave our house immediately. When I went to log on to care.com three days later my profile had been deleted. They wont answer phone and send a prefilled email back when I questioned why and told them what had happened. It is there policy to suspend any account for any reason. This is BAD for those seeking to hire caregivers bc obviously this caregiver contacted them immediately and lied about me so she wouldn't get a negative review. Shame on care.com for not looking out for children in this way.

I've been working for people there for years. One person kept me on hold, being flaky, hiring and then postponing for two months. At the last week of the two month period he flaked again, therefore I was out a job and did not get paid for training. This guy didn't want to pay me so he called Care.com and they disconnected my service without investigation. So now I'm out the money and a job for two months. NEVER did anything wrong as anyone can tell by the text messages. Disgusting Company! They could care less about anyone! Anyone know an attorney? Class Action for sure!

This website experience had so many scam artists posing as potential employers. I am a 50+ year old woman. I have extensive experience in Child Care, Nursing, Foreign Languages and Pet Grooming and Care. I paid money for everything they suggested, and had friends, family members and colleagues submit reference for me. After spending several days complying with all their hoops and background checks etc the only replies I got were fraudulent. Save your precious time and money and network on your own. Extremely Stressful Experience Never Again!
Regards

Very disappointed. After placing my post, I found that I could not respond to many applicants unless I upgraded. So, essentially, I had to pay to even communicate with anyone, even if they weren't appropriate for the job. Not only that, I do not believe that the applicants are aware that a potential employer cannot respond to them, unless the employer becomes a premium member. So here are the applicants paying for "premium" membership, but are probably not aware that a potential employer is not allowed to respond to them, due to no fault of there own. Horrible practice. Care one does not allow you to send any messages to reply. Again, very disappointed. Waste of time.

It's nearly impossible to get in contact with an actual person, then when you finally do you are connected with someone who doesn't speak English well & cant understand the issues you are calling with.
The deactivate your account without notice.
I've been a member for 5 years with all my ratings over 5 star and have fought every step of the way with care.com.
Writing emails through care.com is a challenge as you can't see past when you've wrote a whole screen.
They deactivated my account in the middle of a very big job opportunity and I lost it due to their carelessness and lack of communication.

Scam. I don't want to give them one star. They don't connect you with clients unless you pay them. The rated "fees for your area" are false and when asked they claim is up to the cleaner to negotiate with the client. This is not possible because they already created a false expectation on the client. So they shouldn't mention fees. Some people want their house in an upscale neighborhood to be cleaned for prices I myself haven't seen since the 80's. These people are causing home workers to lose business.

I signed up with care.com as a babysitter, caregiver and petsitter (3different profiles) and stayed on for 3 months. I have +10 years experience in child and animal care including special needs children, CPR/first aid training as well as 4 years experience as a caregiver and in the 3 months I was on the site, even with all that experience and a good review I got 2 interviews and no jobs. I filled out my profile, kept it up to date and paid for a background check and still rarely got past dm's with everyone that messaged me. There's no accountability for the parents either so while I put time, effort and money into finding a job, the parents don't even have to have a picture. I've seen craigslist job postings with more info than almost all the profiles the parents set up on this site. It's not just the parents; care.com not only makes you pay for a subscription but has "badges" within the site like a video game so if you don't earn enough badges, you're chances at someone looking at your profile goes down which is ridiculous because i'm already paying them. If you want to end your subscription and remove your account, they take their sweet time and still charge for that month and you have to keep going back to the site every day double checking until it's confirmed because there's a chance they'll keep charging your card in the background if you aren't careful.

After paying the $20 pro caregiver membership, over three weeks went by and my profile was still in not approved status so I had just wasted $20 and when I contacted the customer service and told them that I wanted to cancel my pro membership and receive a refund as my profile had still not been approved, therefore I was not able to get any leads, they told me that they don't do refunds. They offered no explanation as to why the paid profile was never approved and refused to give the refund. What a waste!

My wife and I are expecting our first child soon, so we're exploring our options for nannies in case the SAHM plan doesn't work out.

I tried signing up for a care.com account and the system wouldn't let me create an account (Error Code: *******). I called and got the confrontational response everybody gets - "per the care.com TOS, we don't need to tell you why your account was terminated and we can terminate it for any reason. Common reasons include...(list of really bad stuff)". It's so silly - I've never used the site, so I do not even have an account for them to terminate... and I couldn't have possibly violated any rules during the five minute setup process. My wife and I are straight shooters with squeaky clean records, so I don't know what could have possibly compelled them to treat me like a criminal.

It's not the end of the world (I'll just sign up on SitterCity or something) but I don't understand how a company can have such abysmal customer service and still remain in business.

For 6-7 years I worked diligently on building up my Care.com profile. I worked with many families and garnered a decent following with reviews and a reputable status. It was a really nice setup that I spent a lot of money, time, and hard work putting together. Around my 6th year as a loyal and paying member of Care.com as a nanny, I worked with one woman for a total of two TRIAL days. I told her I felt it was not a good fit for my life at the time and that I wished the family luck in finding a care provider better suited to their needs. For weeks afterwards, the woman then calls me, texts me, leaves voicemails and emails for me. She continues to yell at me, tell me I am "dumb and lazy" and that her professional status in the mental health field meant she was qualified, after literally knowing me for three days, to diagnose me as an unfit employee because I did not wish to work for her family. I was respectful and moved along, reaching out to the support team at Care.com to see if I could get any help in not having this woman continue to harass me. I never got a response from them, but rather I received calls from my old references wondering why this lady was saying I was so disturbed and insane. They obviously did not believe her and wanted to help me. I open my email and there it is: "we have shut down your account due to undisclosed reasons regarding violations of Care.com's rules..." The woman had reached out to them, and they did not even give my email a read, they blocked me from the site indefinitely. I have been struggling to find nearly anything without this site, but am appalled at their lack of CARE for the employees and their well being. For families, and those who are lucky, this site is a phenomenal asset. For situations like mine, where the family isn't a good match/the parents are overly upset/unreasonable, this is the worst place to find a job. Everyone around me told me to find an attorney, because this woman did something illegal by contacting references and past employers and getting my PAID 6+ year membership shut down. Three years later, Care.com still refuses to reach back out to me or even let me explain my situation to rebuild and repay for an account. I am disgusted by their lack of CARE. Not worth it.

My teenage daughter tried to become a member to find pet sitting jobs. When I tried to approve her account via email, I kept getting a dead end message. Naturally, there is no customer service phone number (because that would imply that they HAVE customer service) so when I tried to do their stupid "chat w/a tech" option, it (obviously) auto generated generic questions before saying it would transfer me to a tech person, then sent me straight to the "give us your credit card before we answer your question" option. I'm a little too old to fall for that scam, thanks.
The glowing reviews they have on their site? Safe bet that a lot are fake. When I checked actual unaffiliated review sites, I read a bunch of horror stories from people who were actual Care.com members, so I'm relieved that I was unable to make it through the membership process & wasn't willing to pay the $1 fee to talk to a supposed tech support agent! Been burned by membership programs with too many companies to give out my credit card info ever again!