When you sign up to a house sitting website, you will need to create a profile to give homeowners an insight as to who you are as a person. You must show you are clean, mature and responsible. There are five crucial elements in nailing your profile and ensuring you land house sitting jobs.
The five main points in your house sitting profile are The Headline, Your Profile Pictures, Personal Details, Experience, and References. Continue reading for tips on each of these areas and examples to help you create the best house sitting profile.
Write an Attention-Grabbing Headline
This is the first thing a Home Owner is going to see when you apply for a house sitting job. You want this to be a concise, catchy phrase that sums you up as a great candidate.
It's crucial your headline stands out from the crowd. People have short attention spans. when homeowners post a listing for a house sitting job they will receive a lot of applications from house sitters. You want your headline to jump out at them when they browse through all the candidate's applications.
Keep it brief. The goal of a profile headline is to clearly state what makes you a great House Sitter. Your headline doesn't even need to be a complete sentence. You just have to choose words that get the message across quickly and powerfully.
Your goal is for them to read your headline and be intrigued enough to click your profile and continue reading about you. Use the headline as a teaser to your main profile, anything longer than a sentence defeats the purpose of a headline.
Use adjectives to describe your abilities clearly. These are a powerful way to paint a picture of your skills to homeowners. Use words like best, brilliant, excellent, fantastic, honest, mature, reliable.
How long should your header be? Most recommendations online suggest around 70 characters for an effective headline. Which is around 10-12 words. The best trick is to describe as many benefits as you can in a limited amount of words.
Examples of Good Headlines:
Female Pair–responsible, experienced, good with animals
Why it's Effective: In just 7 words they have let us know who they are, told us they're experienced and that they will look after the house and pets responsibly.
Mature, clean, experienced, loving pet sitter available
Why it's Effective: They have described themselves as someone who seems responsible, trusting and loving. It highlights qualities that portray a great house sitter and is concise.
Active retired couple – will take GREAT care of your home and your pets!
Why it's Effective: This example describes who they are in 3 words and then effectively grabs the reader's attention by telling them exactly what they can do for them.
Use a mixture of these tactics when you are creating your own house sitting profile. Write down a few different examples and play around with the words before you go live with it.
Uploading the Perfect Profile Picture
Unlike other online job sites like Craigslist and Upwork, you don’t have to post a professional-looking headshot. I would recommend going for a more relaxed approach when it comes to choosing a picture for your house sitting profile.
Find fun photos of you traveling, playing with pets or even on prior house sits. This will help show homeowners who you are as a person and will land you more house sits.
Make sure the pictures you upload are high-quality images, not just some blurry photo of you on your travels. Having high-resolution images and a catchy header will help you stand out to homeowners and they will be more likely to click on your profile.
Profile pictures with animals in them are far more likely to be recognized. Show homeowners pictures of you and your pets, or with animals that you have previously cared for. Every photo that you upload needs to help homeowners build a better picture of you in their mind. So paint a picture of a loving, responsible and mature person.
Most House Sitting platforms will allow you to upload more than one photo to your profile, ensure you put up more than one to make your profile look more official.
Adding Relevant Profile Details
This is the section where you can dive deeper into who you are as a person and sell yourself to homeowners, to convince them you are right for the job.
Put yourself in the viewpoint of the homeowner here, they are trusting their home and family pets with you. Why should they do that? You want to highlight qualities in you that would make you seem like a great candidate for house sitting. i.e. Responsible, mature, animal lover.
Some relevant information you might add:
Who are you?
What’s your age?
Where are you from?
Are you working or traveling?
What are your travel & work experiences?
Do you have pets?
Do you have experience with caring for pets?
What are your interests?
Do you have your own house?
Do you have any house sitting experience?
Will you house sit on your own or with a partner?
Why are you the right person?
Things you want to achieve in the future.
Some skills that can benefit in this situation (gardening, repairing, …)
Don’t convert your profile into a life story. Keep it short, detailed but full of relevant information about yourself and your experiences that reflect that you’re the man/woman for the job.
Past House or Pet Sitting Experience
This is the key to landing house sitting jobs. Homeowners want to know that you are someone who can be trusted and have experience looking after pets, or homes. You need to build their trust by highlighting previous work that you’ve done with animals or house sitting.
Obviously, if you have experience in house sitting or pet sitting then add all of this to your profile, if you have a membership to Trusted House Sitters or House Sit Match then this will automatically be done after each completed house sit.
If you are a beginner house sitter with no experience, don’t fret. You can still get lots of jobs. You’ll just need to be a bit more creative with your experience.
Did you have pets as a kid? Tell homeowners about your experience with them. How you fed and cared for them. Have you ever looked after kids or babysat at someone's home? This is a great way to show you can responsibly look after someone's homes and loved ones.
An awesome way to get experience in house sitting while you are just starting out is to reach out to friends, family or neighbors that are heading out of town on vacation. You can offer to watch over their house and pet for free. This a great way for you to test your skills as a house sitter and build experience.
Ask these people to give you references to show future homeowners when you apply for house sits.
References
You will need to prove that the things you've said on your House Sitting profile are true.
References or recommendations are a good way of showing the house owners that you are who you say you are.
Any time you complete a house sit, ask the homeowners if they are willing to give you a reference to add to your house sitting profile. This will quickly build your status on any house sitting website, and the more positive references you can get, the more house sitting jobs you will land.
As with the experience section, if you are just starting out as a house sitter and don't have any house sitting references. You can use references in other areas of your life, these references can give valuable insights into your personality, work ethic, values and how trustworthy you will be as a house sitter.
If you need to find references, ask anyone from your employer, to a sports coach, teacher or landlord. Anything that shows your character and maturity.
Have you ever stayed in an Airbnb or HomeAway before? If you are clean and respectable in someone's home then these are perfect qualities for a house sitter. Get references or recommendations from homeowners when you use these services to build your house sitting profile.
Just beginning House Sitting and unsure what website to use? Check out our Review of the Best House Sitting Websites.
If you are ready to create the perfect house sitting profile then sign up with our favorite platform Trusted House Sitters below.
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