I do my first interview AFTER hours for several reasons ~ primarily because for years I have to listen to my spouses horror stories from work about the seedy underbelly of society and while I like to believe that the world is primarily an awesome place and focus on the good with his work experiences being the 'rarity' of society I was raised to hope for the best but to plan for the worse so to speak.

I do not want to be home alone with the children while having a 'stranger' coming into my home who as mentioned could be any whacko as well as I do not want to expose the currently enrolled children to too many strangers cause sometimes you can interview a few people finding the perfect one you actually 'want' to accept into care and finally I just had too much experience over the years with people who go around 'interviewing' childcare centres when in reality they are just looking for free play dates for their children and wanting to be nosy about what childcare providers 'do all day'

My interviews have 3 stages the email / phone interview, the tour of the program after hours and the final stage is during program hours for a morning about 1 hour in length.

I hate giving up evening time to interview as well but I do it because I prefer to be able to have my spouse home and to give them my undivided attention cause trying to interview and 'work' at the same time can be very challenging. If we both feel we are a match and they are 99% sure they want to sign a contract and I want to have them THEN as the last stage of the process I invite them to come for a daytime visit to see the program in action and for me to see their child interact with the group and than to see me in action managing the group before we commit to signing the contract.