The short answer
An online form with CV upload and availability, posting into your CRM. Not an email address on a contact page, and not a form that lands in a shared inbox for someone to retype.
Good nannies register with three or four agencies in an evening. Whoever makes it easiest and replies first gets the first conversation.
What the form has to capture
Enough to decide whether to interview, and no more:
- Name, location and how far they will travel
- Role type wanted: permanent, temporary, live-in, live-out, nanny share, maternity nurse, au pair
- Availability: start date, days, hours, overnights, weekends
- Experience: years, ages of children worked with, sole charge, multiples, special educational needs
- Qualifications and paediatric first aid, with expiry dates
- Checks held and their dates
- Driving licence and own car
- Languages
- Right to work status in the country they want to work in
- CV upload
Anything else belongs in the interview.
Structured fields beat a CV alone
A CV is a document you have to read. Availability, radius, role type and first aid expiry as structured fields are things you can search. Ask for both: the fields make the candidate findable in your CRM, the CV gives you the story.
If your system can parse a CV into fields, still let the candidate correct what it read. Parsers are wrong often enough to lose you people.
Get the upload right
Accept the formats people actually have, including PDF and the common word processor formats, and a photo of a document from a phone. Say the size limit before they choose the file rather than after the upload fails. Show progress on a mobile connection, and keep the rest of the form filled in if the upload errors.
Uploads that silently fail on a phone are the most common reason a registration never arrives.
Do not collect sensitive documents on a web form
Certificates, check certificates and identity documents should not be uploaded through a public form and should never be displayed anywhere on the site. Collect the numbers and dates at registration, then verify the documents through your own process at interview.
Criminal record information is sensitive personal data in most jurisdictions and carries extra obligations. Keep it out of the website entirely and hold it under your normal candidate process.
Consent and privacy, briefly
A short line under the submit button linking a real privacy notice: what you collect, why, how long you keep a registration, who sees it, and how to ask for it to be deleted. A separate unticked box if you want to contact them about roles beyond the one they applied for.
Candidate data is the material an agency lives on. Treat retention seriously and say what your period is.
Where it lands
Straight into your recruitment CRM or applicant tracking system through an integration, with the fields mapped rather than dumped into a notes box, and a mailbox copy as a fallback so nothing is lost if the integration fails.
Then an automatic confirmation to the candidate saying what happens next and when they will hear, and a notification to you with location, role type and availability in the subject line so you can triage from a phone.
Two things that lift registrations
Say what registration costs. For most agencies that is nothing, and saying so plainly removes the doubt that stops good candidates registering.
Say what happens next. How long the process takes, what the interview involves, what you will need from them, and roughly how many roles you place in their area. Certainty is the thing candidates are shopping for.
Test it as a candidate would
Complete it on a phone, one-handed, with a real CV file, on a slow connection. Check the keyboard type on each field, check errors appear beside the field, check nothing is lost on a browser reload, and check the record arrived in the CRM with every field populated.
Where this sits
A structured registration form with CV upload, availability and a real CRM integration is part of every nanny agency website we build, and the same intake pattern runs through our childcare websites. The packages are on pricing. Make registering a five minute job and the good candidates finish it.