> General

Care.com is an online service that matches care & service providers in the areas of child care, tutoring, pet care, and senior care to the people who need their help. We will be continuously rolling out new features and benefits over the coming weeks and months so check back often.

If you're looking for care, join Care.com to connect with providers who meet your needs and requirements. Start by searching for providers in your area. When you find providers that match your needs, connect with them through Care.com.

Check out our How It Works page to find out more.

There are many different types of child care, pet care, senior care, and tutoring. When specifying the type of care or services that you either need or provide, it helps to know some basic industry terms:

• Child Care Terms:

  Babysitters typically provide child care on an occasional basis.

  Nannies provide more continuous, routine child care. Nannies work either part-time or full-time and sometimes live with the families they care for.

  Au Pairs are typically young people from another country who provide child care in exchange for room and board, pocket money, and the opportunity to live abroad.

• Tutoring Terms:

  Tutorsoften specialize in a particular subject area and a particular grade or ability level. Parents and tutors should be sure to discuss the grade level of the student in need of tutoring and any special challenges he or she may face as well the subject and topic with which he or she needs help.

• Senior Care Terms:

  Companions provide in-home care and companionship for seniors who are capable of independent living. While companions do not provide medical care, they may perform household chores such as cooking and cleaning.

  Caregivers provide in-home care for seniors who are not capable of independent living but who want to remain in their own homes.

  Respite Care Providers provide short-term senior care in the temporary absence of the primary caregiver.

  Assisted Living Facilities provide care for seniors who are not capable of independent living but do not require the intensive care of a nursing home. Residents of assisted living facilities receive the help they need while maintaining as much independence as possible.

  Nursing Homes provide care for seniors who require constant assistance and medical care.

  Hospice Nurses provide in-home care and comfort for seniors who are terminally ill.

• Pet Care Terms:

  Pet Sitters and Walkers provide in-home pet care. Depending on the length of the pet owners' absence, pet sitters/walkers may be responsible for any combination of meals, exercise/walks, play, companionship, cleanup, and sometimes other services such as mail retrieval, housekeeping, etc.

  Doggie Day Cares provide either drop-off or pick-up daytime services for pets while their owners are at work, usually with a group of other dogs of similar size and temperament. These can include any spectrum of a la carte services, and generally vary from person to person or business to business.

  Kennels Kennels provide long-term, out-of-home boarding for pets. In addition to meals and exercise, kennels may also provide training and grooming. The amount of attention/exercise your pet receives can vary greatly.

• Housekeeping terms:

  Housekeepers provide a wide variety of cleaning services for your home. Housekeepers may work for themselves or may be employed by a housekeeping agency.

If you are not able to watch videos from your computer, it may be that you need to upgrade your Flash plug-in. Please visit the Macromedia website to install the latest version of the Flash player at: http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/

We use email notifications to keep our members informed of important changes in our service-things like new caregivers in your area who match your needs or special offers available through our members-only online shopping mall. We try to find the right balance with our emails by sending helpful and engaging emails without overloading your inbox. Help us to strike the right email balance for you by clicking here to set your email preferences. Please note that if you are not already logged into your account, you will be prompted to log in. Deselect any of the boxes for emails that you would prefer not to receive. Don't forget to click "Submit" to save your new settings.

If you've forgotten your password, request a temporary password by entering your email address and zip code. We'll email you a temporary password so you can log in to your account and reset your password.

Care.com has caregivers across the United States. To find caregivers near you, try searching, posting a job, or browsing for babysitting providers, nanny providers, special needs care providers, instructors, senior care providers, pet care providers, housekeepers, and personal assistants by metro area.

Finding caregivers in your local area is easy. At the top of every page on the Care.com website, you will find a search box. Select the service that you are interested in, enter your ZIP code, and click "Go". You will then see a list of local caregivers within a defined number of miles from your ZIP code. If your search does not return any results, try increasing the number of miles around your ZIP code and run the search again.

Another way to find a local caregiver is to post a job. When you post a job we will notify caregivers about your job. Interested caregivers can then apply for your job by sending you a message on Care.com. We will notify you every time you receive a job application.

The first step is to find a provider that meets your needs. You can do this by logging in to your account and searching for providers in your area. When viewing your search results, click on the name of a provider to see their detailed profile. When viewing a provider's profile, simply click on the "Contact Details" tab for information about how to contact that provider.

Start by searching for a caregiver on Care.com. When the search results display, you'll notice a "Refine your search" area on the left side of the screen. Within the "General Information" section of this area, you will see the Keyword Search box right above the "Refine Results" button. Enter a keyword and click "Refine Results". When your search results are returned, your search criteria will be highlighted in yellow in the caregiver's profile, making it easy to see exactly where your keywords were matched.

To use keyword search, just enter the keyword that you are looking for and only caregiver's that include that word in their profile will be returned in search results. For example, if you are looking for a caregiver that can play or teach the piano, you might enter "piano" as a keyword. Similarly if you are looking for a caregiver that attended a specific college or university, you might enter the name of the college or university as a keyword.

Keyword search will look at the following fields of a caregiver's profile.

• First Name
• First Initial of Last Name
• Description
• Related Hobbies and Interests
• City
• School
• Major
• Languages Spoken
• Other Qualifications

Our keyword search feature offers many advanced features. These features are described in more detail below.

Search Terms

Your search query can include a single term such as "crafts" or "student" or a multi-word phrase.

When searching for a multi-word phrase, be sure to put double quotes around the phrase like this:

Boolean Operators

Boolean operators allow terms to be combined through logic operators. They must be ALL CAPS and include:

• OR
• AND
• +
• NOT

OR

The OR operator is the default conjunction operator. This means that if there is no Boolean operator between two terms, the OR operator is used. The OR operator links two terms and finds a matching profile if either of the terms exist in a profile.

To search for profiles that contain either "nursing student" or just "nursing" use the query:

or

AND

The AND operator returns profiles where both terms exist anywhere in the specified fields of a single profile.

To search for profiles that contain "nursing student" and "First Aid" use the query:

+

The "+" or required operator requires that the term after the "+" symbol exist somewhere in the field of a single profile.

To search for profiles that must contain "crafts" and may contain "nursing" use the query:

NOT

The NOT operator excludes profiles that contain the term after NOT.

To search for profiles that contain "nursing student" but not "part time" use the query:

Note: The NOT operator cannot be used with just one term. For example, the following search will return no results:

Grouping

Keyword search supports using parentheses to group clauses to form sub queries. This can be very useful if you want to control the Boolean logic for a query.

To search for either "student" or "nursing" and "crafts" use the query:

This eliminates any confusion and makes sure that "crafts" must exist and either term "student" or "nursing" may exist.

Wildcard Searches

Keyword search supports single character wildcard searches within single terms (not within phrase queries).

To perform a single character wildcard search use the "?" symbol.

The single character wildcard search looks for terms that match that with the single character replaced. For example, to search for "text" or "test" you can use the search:

Note: You cannot use the "?" symbol as the first character of a search.

Word Variations

Keyword search supports word variation searches automatically. For example, to search for "craft" or "crafts" you can just use the search:

Words NOT Included in Your Results

To improve the quality of your search results, keyword search will automatically ignore certain words from your search. These words include:

As a care seeker, you can rate a care provider on a number of specific criteria. Each individual rating is based on a 5-star scale. These individual ratings are then averaged to give the overall rating for your review. The ratings from all reviews are then averaged to give a member their Average User Rating.

The criteria we use are: Quality of Care; Reliability; Responsiveness; Punctuality; and Professionalism. We chose these traits based upon feedback from our members, who indicated these are the traits most important to them when finding a trustworthy care provider.

A review is feedback that one member can leave about another. It consists of ratings, a title, and a short written evaluation.

As a care seeker, you can review any care provider within the service to which you are subscribed. Please review only providers who have worked for you or with whom you've had contact!

In order to write a review about a care provider, you must fill out the form found on the Reviews page of a care provider's profile. The form has three parts: ratings; a title; and a description. All three are required. Once you submit a review, it generally takes 1-2 business days for the review to be approved by our Member Care team.

In order to foster a respectful community, it is our policy to approve reviews before they are posted to a member's account. Please follow our reviewing guidelines to ensure a smooth and efficient approval process.

Check our reviewing guidelines, make any necessary changes, and re-submit! If you are still having trouble, you may contact Member Care.