Hello THS owners/hosts,
As sitters we are curious what it looks like from your POV when you need a sitter.
I understand you can just post your listing. But do you have an option to “search” for a sitter using any particular criteria other than where they live?
We have filters for locations (beach, mountains, country, city) and other filters for things like “use of car, hi speed WiFi, pets welcome” etc.
Are there any such filters for you all to narrow down your search if you are looking for…say non smokers, or sitters with experience with a certain type of pet or home?
Just wondering.
Thank you!
I am not a host but as a sitter using the website, I do see the ‘find a sitter’ option. Not sure if a host account would see anything differently, but what I see besides location is filters for dates, types of pets and experience, with an option to either check ‘member reviews’ or 'house sitting experience. The latter brings up both members with reviews and ones with references.
I think what hosts see is different than what we see as sitters.
Below are screenshots of what we see as hosts when we ‘Search for Sitters’. We have a few filters but not many. We can search by location, then filter on type of pets, member reviews (just if they have them, not how many stars), families or traveling as a couple. Hope this helps.
(Sitter thumbnail profiles edited to comply with the Posting Guidelines)
As hosts we typically don’t search for sitters. We publish dates on our profile and then interested sitters express their interest. We choose amongst the applicants. Last year we had a THS sitter booked in June for our January trip but they had to cancel mid November because of an injury. We republished our dates but as you can expect there wasn’t much interest for a 8 weeks sit just 6 weeks away. We published on two other sites, one of which my wife sent close to 140 invitations to suitable sitters (according to their profile) because we thought that was how that site worked. Nobody was interested or available. I guess we would have had the same results had we sent invitations on THS, which we didn’t as many on the forum have said it doesn’t work. Someone eventually applied on the second site and was a perfect fit. We hope never to go through that type of stress again. 
I never use the search for a sitter method as it’s known to be a waste of effort.. If you manually reach out to them they are usually not available or not interested. If sitters are available and interested in a sit, they will apply when the sit is advertised.
I have accepted sits from invitations, albeit they were repeat sits. 
@gchampagne Oh my…did you manage to find someone?
Thanks, all.
I kind of figured it was like that. As sitters we have a fair amount of filters (not as many as we’d like) and I wondered what hosts had, if much of anything.
I know contacting sitters is not successful for most people - I think personally, that it is often bc they are just sending invites out to anyone with good reviews within a reasonable distance but not really doing a full read on the sitters profile and experiences. We have been contacted by hosts for sits that do not fit anything we’ve done before. But I appreciate them trying.
I wish there was a better way for hosts to look for sitters with specific experience and review ratings (ie “at least 10/20/30 five* reviews, non smokers, home owners, experience with luxury homes, dog training experience, speaks _____ language” or whatever)
Like a dating app, it would be nice if we could match more than by just using dates, location and animals. IMO
Or a keyword search for sitters like “non smokers” or “vegan” or whatever …
