Working interviews in childcare: how to run one legally

Plan to pay for the time. The U.S. Department of Labor publishes no rule that names the working interview — what it publishes is the hours-worked principle that sits underneath one.

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, "employ" includes suffering or permitting a person to work, and the department's Fact Sheet #22 on hours worked puts the consequence plainly: "Work not requested but suffered or permitted to be performed is work time that must be paid for by the employer."

Read that against a classroom trial.

A candidate who is supervising children, leading an activity or helping through lunch and cleanup is doing productive work you know about and are letting happen — the situation the principle describes.

An unpaid trial of that kind risks being compensable time, so the practical plan is to run every trial as paid time from the first minute.

This is a risk to manage, not a bright line: the guidance does not address working interviews by name, and how the principle lands on a particular trial is a wage-and-hour question.

That question belongs with the U.S. Department of Labor or your employment counsel — not with a policy borrowed from another center's handbook.

Paying the trial also squares it with the rule that shapes the rest of this page.

Once the candidate is doing the job's work in your classrooms, the background-check conditions that attach when a hire begins work are the conditions to run the trial under.

The federal baseline is the CCDF background-check rule at 45 CFR 98.43, administered by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF).

It covers providers that are licensed, regulated or registered, and providers receiving subsidy, and states can add rules on top of it.

Under 45 CFR 98.43(d)(4), a staff member may begin work after a qualifying result on either the FBI fingerprint check or the in-state fingerprint check — but until every component of the check clears, they must be supervised at all times by an individual who received a qualifying result.

A classroom trial is work in your building, so those are the conditions to run it under.

No classroom time until at least one fingerprint check has returned a qualifying result, and a fully cleared staff member in the room for the whole trial.

A candidate with no fingerprint result yet does not go into a classroom at all: the federal rule pairs one qualifying result with constant supervision until the check is complete — it never licenses an unsupervised candidate.

Confirm with your state child care licensing agency. Some states are stricter than the federal floor, and some bar any work before the full check clears.

What your state adds, and whether your program is covered by the CCDF rules, are questions for the agency — ask before you put a trial on the calendar, not after the candidate is in the room.

Start the paperwork early either way.

Caring for Our Children Basics, the standards volume from ACF's Office of Child Care (July 2025), says programs should conduct background screenings as quickly as possible and complete them within 45 days, with staff re-screened at least every 5 years — so the moment a trial becomes a maybe is the moment the request goes in.

The mechanics are the same ones a provisional hire runs on; our guide to hiring provisionally, pending a background check walks through them in detail.

One neighboring question this page hands off entirely: whether a candidate whose checks are still pending counts toward your state's staff-to-child ratio.

That is set by your state's licensing rules, and our guide to who counts in ratio covers it.

Decide what you are hiring for before the candidate arrives, then watch for those behaviors instead of forming a general impression.

Presence with children is the core of it: does the candidate get down to a child's level to speak, wait out a child who is fighting a zipper, notice the one drifting at the edge of circle time?

Guidance style is the second: what they do when two children want the same truck tells you more than anything they said about guidance in the interview.

Watch the unglamorous minutes too.

Transitions — cleanup, handwashing, lining up, nap mats — are where classroom presence shows, and so are the routines that never make the job ad: diapering, spills, the child who will not join the activity.

Note whether the candidate follows your teacher's lead on those routines or improvises around them; either way, you have learned something about how they will land in your rooms.

Keep the observation fair and recorded.

Give every candidate the same block, the same lead-in and the same activities, and have the same person write notes right after — impressions fade, and you may need to explain a hiring decision later.

Your cleared teacher, who has to be in the room anyway, is your best observer; debrief them before you file your own impressions.

Treat the trial as the second half of the conversation you started in the interview process: the seated interview shows how a candidate thinks about children, the trial shows what they actually do.

No federal rule sets how long a working interview runs — the DOL guidance behind the pay risk does not address the trial by name, and our research found no federal standard to borrow.

Your state's licensing rules may say something, so confirm with your licensing agency before you fix a standard length.

Otherwise the length is yours to set, and two things are worth optimizing: long enough to watch a real block of the day — arrival, an activity, a transition — and identical for every candidate, so the trials compare.

A structure that works runs in three moves.

The candidate first observes beside your cleared teacher, learning the room's routines; then joins the activity as an extra pair of hands; then leads one short activity while the teacher stays in the room.

The teacher never leaves, the candidate is never responsible for the room, and by the end you have seen the candidate in both low-demand and high-demand moments.

The pay risk shapes the structure: the longer a trial runs and the more productive work it contains, the more it looks like compensable work time.

If you need a full day of productive classroom work before you can decide, that is not an interview — run it as a paid first day and decide from the shift you are already paying for.

Whichever shape the trial takes, tell the candidate the time is paid before they arrive, put their time through payroll, and pay it promptly.

Then close the loop fast either way: a candidate who spent the morning in your rooms is interviewing you back.

This page is employer information, not licensing or legal advice. Background-check and supervision rules are set by the federal CCDF rule and by your state child care licensing agency, and wage-and-hour questions belong with the U.S. Department of Labor or your employment counsel — confirm current requirements with them before you run a trial or make a hire.