I Owe My Job to the INA
By Rachael L. Lubin
The summer of 2018 was rough. Less than a month after the dopamine-high of the Tucson INA Conference, I made the gut-wrenching decision to leave my Dallas-area nanny family, with whom I had served for over two years and loved very deeply. I started job searching quietly, and locally, but after exhausting the local market, I opened up my hunt nationwide.
As we do early on in our job searches, often before we even give notice, we ask our friends for help: Sometimes from our acquaintances in moms groups, sometimes from our nanny support organizations, and often from our professional colleagues who know our skill set and capabilities. As nannies, we know great childcare jobs are posted in thousands of places, on hundreds of job boards, online and off, and there is no way to see all of them. Having extra sets of eyes and ears on our side can help to lighten the load of the seemingly never-ending search through job ads.
One of the people I reached out to when I was amping up my job hunt was Laura Schroeder, who I knew from volunteering with on the Board of Directors of the International Nanny Association. After I had given notice to my former bosses and was starting to get into the panic stage of “What is Going to Happen if I Can’t Find a Job”, I got a Facebook message, out of the blue, from Laura. She asked me if I had seen a particular job posting- and after reading it I told her that I hadn’t, but thanked her for looking out for me. The job posting wasn’t for a position in Dallas – it was for one more than 250 miles away in Houston, but the description seemed like a good next step for me to take in my career, so I sent an introductory email to an unknown address. Within a day, I received a reply, and to my surprise, the sender was 2018 NOTY Nominee Katie Dallmeyer! Her nanny family was in the process of moving from Chicago to Houston, and she was helping them find their next great nanny fit.
Katie and I knew each other from the online nanny pages of course, and from taking a 2-day class called NANNYGUARDS together in 2015; we’d seen each other at a few Nannypalooza conferences, and we even graduated from the same nanny school (though not at the same time), but mostly, we knew each other through INA Conferences. A few days in the Chicago area, plus a few sun-soaked days at a beautiful resort in Tucson, and we had gotten to know each other pretty well! The INA Conference is a great incubator of relationships. It helps strangers bloom into fast friends, makes alliances of like-minded businesses, and revitalizes old ties that have been worn thin from too many long work days and too few days of fun and fellowship. Engaging in workshops together helps us understand each other’s working methods and styles, and connecting in hotel hallways encourages an intense understanding of who we are as individuals who deeply love children.
Katie and I immediately set up a time to video chat to talk about the reality of the position, and from there, she passed on my resume and accompanying information to her employer. Within a few weeks, I had a successful telephone interview, and was on my way to Houston to meet and interview with the parents, their child(ren), and Katie! If you have never interviewed with a former NOTY Nominee in the room (for a job with the family who Nominated her!), let me be clear: it is intimidating! But, it was also incredibly rewarding. Katie wanted the best replacement she could get to take care of her nanny child(ren), and she was absolutely rooting for me! That kind of support behind you is definitely a Board-of-Director approved “recommended practice”!
Having Katie know what it truly meant to be an active member of the INA including abiding by our Commitment to Professional Excellence and our (actual) Recommended Practices, attending Conferences, and being an INA Credentialed nanny, also meant that she could present a whole-person recommendation of me to her bosses. They didn’t have to rely on my resume or portfolio but had the opportunity to have someone they trusted emphatically to provide a real in-person reference for me.
Katie and I had dinner the evening after my interview and she was complimentary of my performance, but without pledging her commitment to my future employment. I went back to Dallas feeling wildly lucky that the INA had provided the medium for the relationships that both presented me a job posting that I hadn’t seen, and helped me earn the trust of someone enough to possibly continue on with the raising of their precious charge(s).
The job had many applicants, and was listed with more than one agency; so when I got the job offer a few days later, I knew my success was not just on me, but on the reputation and opportunities within the INA.