As sitters, we’ve received a number of invitations to sit since becoming members. We recently received an invitation to another country which was a very desirable sit but we weren’t available so declined. I’m curious to know how homeowners find sitters that they want to invite. I read recently there are 185,000 members on this site. We have almost 40 great reviews but there are sitters that have more. I see there is a search by “experience” and “reviews” when looking for a sitter. I decided to check this out but when I clicked on “reviews”, I expected to see sitters ranked by the amount of reviews they had received but this was not the case - sitters weren’t ranked in any order of reviews they had received. A homeowner would have to scroll through a lot of sitter profiles before finding suitable sitters. I’d like to hear from homeowners as to how they go about finding sitters to invite.
So is this ranked then by the self-reported experience that we write in our profiles?
I only wrote one year. I have seen others that claim their whole life (growing up on a farm, for example).
Hi, I think you will get a variety of answers! My own situation as a HO is that we are in a nice but not highly sought after location and sitter needs a car; before Covid I would get 2-4 decent applications and pick the best, but in the last couple of years it’s got a bit scary sometimes with no immediate applications so I actively reach out to anyone who has favourited our listing and also to new sitters in Ireland or the UK who might be willing to take a less exciting location in order to get started. I am willing to take a chance on a new sitter subject to video call as our animals are not very demanding, and it has worked out fine on both occasions.
Probably people in more high demand areas and with more complicated pets are doing the opposite of what I do and looking for experience!
It would be fantastic if we could search by a combination of “dates available” and “locations wished for” but sadly that’s not an option.
Its always been a mystery to me. We get really random invitations that are very flattering to receive but I cant believe from the 100,000 sitters available, we are the best fit for many of them?!?!
Of course you are! 
I think ranking sitters in order of number of reviews would be completely unfair.
When I joined in 2015, it used to be that sitters were ranked according to the number of 5* reviews they had but that’s not the case now. It’s much fairer now as they appear in random order.
Exactly 
and that’s why I don’t do it. The search criteria are quite useless. Actually after clicking on “cats”, “experience” and “reviews” the same results are shown as without criteria.
So far I have only invited sitters when I have been in contact with them before and the sit was already agreed upon.
What I sometimes do is look through the suitable sitters, who saved my listing and check their last reviews. This gives me a good idea where they are or could be headed to, as well as if they do pet sitting as a lifestyle or just once in a while. It still would be a gamble, because I wouldn’t know if their calendar is up to date.
I think there is an algorithm at work - we go several weeks without any invitations and then often get 3or 4 in one day !!
It’s frequently for dates when we already have confirmed sits - we politely reply to all invitations received - many homeowners have been surprised when we point out our calendar shows we already have a sit for those dates . They have told us they used a date search function and therefore reasonably concluded that all sitters bought up in the results must be available for the dates they input .
That’s how I feel! It just has me curious 
I agree - it used to be like that when I first joined THS. When you searched for a sitter the ones that had the most reviews appeared at the top.
We don’t receive loads of invites but a few weeks ago we had three from Australian sits all in the same week. One knew we were in Asia and was hoping we would hop over, one just liked us and one was bonkers. Really odd, no idea. We couldn’t do any of them and our calendar said that 
#gofigure
Great question @Globetrotter. I too started to get random invites to sit once I hit double digit positive reviews. Not sure either how HO picked me either?
I’d venture that sitters get cycled through automatically and at various points, to help spread the chance of getting sits around. That’s to help any member feel like they’re getting their money’s worth.
Like I received my first unsolicited invitation within a week or two of joining, even though I had no referrals or reviews. And the hosts lived across the country from me. I checked then and found my sitter profile within the first few pages if you clicked on looking for a sitter.
If that’s happening and some of us have more reviews (especially great ones), those folks would logically get more unsolicited invites.
If there is automated rotation, it’s crude. Why I say that: If it weren’t, we would be getting invites that were a better fit. As it is, many of us get invites we don’t accept, because they’re bad fits for dates, locations, etc.
I agree. This must be incredibly frustrating for HO’s when they search, expecting that the filters actually work. I also like the way sitters are randomised to give everyone a fair chance of receiving a request. However, it should be randomised among those sitters who are actually available.
Imagine searching for a hotel on Booking. com or Airbnb, only to find that 90% of the results are actually unavailable. 
That’s the problem: You can have randomization for fairness sake, but crude randomization means people get surfaced “evenly” but uselessly. Like what good does it do you or me to get surfaced to hosts with sits we’d never accept?
With more sophisticated randomization, THS would be able to randomize with relevance. Like say you want to go to X city and THS knows that and surfaces such invitations to you and other sitters with that city preference when hosts are looking for such sitters, but they randomize those invites fairly.
Like imagine a cafeteria that offered free meals, but offering meatloaf fairly to vegetarians would be useless. If they were more sophisticated, they’d offer meatloaf fairly to people who eat meat. And even more sophisticated, they’d offer meatloaf to people who actually like meatloaf.
We haven’t been members that long, so we don’t have many reviews yet, so I have invited relatively local sitters who also don’t have a lot of reviews for our sits. My reasoning is that we both would benefit from boosting our reviews and if they are relatively close, it gives us the opportunity to meet in person prior to the sit. That said, of our 3 sits so far, the first sitter was a couple from Utah (we’re just outside Chicago) who just read our listing and applied (they were fantastic), and the other 2 was a newcomer to the site who lived nearby (we had actually invited him to apply).
As we get more reviews, we might use a different approach.
Judy, you are not the only homeowner graciously accepting a sitter with no or few reviews. We were confirmed for our second sit by homeowners that were specifically choosing to give sitters their early experience and that precious review. I will always be grateful to them.
I am also grateful to the sitters who took a chance on US! It’s always a little leap of faith, and ultimately, it’s all about the TRUST in Trusted Housesitters!