I was just idly browsing house sitters available in my area (I am a sitter, not an owner) to see how visible my profile is. I notice there seem to be filters on the right side of the search (I am using the website, not the app). However, these filters (house sitting experience, member reviews) don’t seem to work as I expected. If I select both of these filters, the first hit is a sitter with one review/virtually no experience! Sitters with lots of reviews/experience are way down the list. So:-
Am I doing something wrong? Is there actually a way to search so that people with lots of experience/reviews come top of the list?
If not, what are these filters for? I can’t really understand how they help anyone.
I’m sure you’ll get a better answer but, as I understand it, the order of sitters and housesits changes. Not sure how long it takes to change but someone will know,
As for looking at sitters with the most reviews, please don’t discount those who are just starting out and have none. While many of us sitters have quite a few reviews we all had to start somewhere. You’ll notice that sitters without reviews yet may well have references from others they’ve housesat for before joining THS.
We all had to start from no reviews. I’ll be forever grateful to the first homeowners who accepted me.
Hi @ThePetProfessor
I couldn’t agree more with @Smiley every sitter had to start from somewhere as I am sure you are aware being a sitter yourself. If I understand your questions properly what I can tell you from doing this myself is that when I select those two filters “Experience” and then “Member reviews” I get members that have had both…it doesn’t sort them by who has the most and the least it’s all mixed together. Again when I select just one “Experience” I get anyone that has any kind of experience. When I select just “Member reviews” on the first line I get some that have 19 reviews and others that have one to two.
My understanding about these filters is to help homeowners like myself search for a desired sitter…so maybe I am only comfortable with having sitters that have member reviews, or maybe I only want to consider members that have had sitting experience but it doesn’t matter to me if they have been reviewed my any other homeowners…or maybe I am the type of homeowner that is only comfortable if the sitter has experience as well as been reviewed by other members. I guess it all comes down to different comfort levels.
Once I add dates for upcoming travel it will certainly limit a lot of people if I have selected both of these filters. If I don’t select either one with my dates then I can see there are a lot more sitters on offer. I hope that makes sense and help answer your questions!
I think adding additional filters for owners could be helpful, like couples or singles, etc…even though with such a large membership, it will still be like finding a needle in a haystack for most of them. I think one of the most helpful things would be ordering listings by how recently the person has been active. I’m a sitter and I occasionally look at other sitter profiles just to see what other people write,etc. And I see so many listings on the first couple of pages where the last review (and they often just have one or two) was from years back. While their membership is obviously current, they are clearly not actively sitting. I imagine most owners wouldn’t contact someone like this, but time could be saved by not having these profiles listed early on.
I am by no means saying that sitters with no reviews or few reviews should be overlooked. It’s just that I don’t understand the point or value of these search filters. If you search for a sitter in Greater London with experience/reviews, there are 2110 hits. The second hit is someone with 3 reviews. Nothing against these sitters, but surely the results should be ordered by how many reviews/how much experience - it just seems random.
Once again, if I misunderstand the function here, let me know. But if I were a pet parent looking for someone with, say, more than 25 reviews, this filter is useless.
I am sorry you misunderstood what I was saying about sitter reviews _ I was just agreeing with what @Smiley had written.
I am sorry that you don’t understand the point or value of the filters and why they are useful to homeowners that use them…I do also see your point and agree that additional sorting could be useful as well. THS does indeed listen to suggestions that are made here on the forum - so please know your suggestion of having these filters sorted by highest reviews to least has been sent to the appropriate channels.
It’s hard to have a conversation because my replies get held in moderation, so it looks like I’m replying to a different point (they get published only when the discussion has moved on!).
I am still baffled about the utility of this feature, though - if I were a pet parent looking for experience and reviews I don’t think I’d be looking for someone with a single review, while people with more than 50 reviews are buried on page 50 of the list! (With the example of London - I guess you wouldn’t face this problem if you were looking for somewhere less popular - but then again neither would you really need the filters!)
Hi @ThePetProfessor. Overall, I agree. You’d think there would be an easy way to filter and sort by number of reviews. Perhaps the TH product people don’t want to encourage ranking that way.
So from a PP perspective, I’d view the filter as keeping anyone who’s done at least 1 sit with a review. Better than nothing… And personally, I’d lump anyone with more than half a dozen reviews in the same boat, as in they’ve more or less “proven” their reliability, and I’d be lucky to have any of them sit for me.
The “house-sitting experience” filter I truly don’t understand. I’m not even sure what flags it … oh, it must be this question on the sitter profile:
I guess that’s if you want to include sitters with 0 reviews but who have sat otherwise.
Perhaps these filters are vestiges from the early days of TH. That’s how I’m going to think about it. =)
I’m guessing TH is already aware of requests to add a fancier search/sort, but they seem to have other priorities. You can chime in by contacting Membership Services (support@trustedhousesitters.com).
I agree with the @ThePetProfessor. Maybe I’m missing something. Surely the purpose of a filter function is to narrow down a search. If filtering by 'Member Reviews results in sitters with 1-50 reviews, what’s the benefit?
