Daycare teacher job description
Most childcare job postings are interchangeable, which is why they are ignored. A posting that answers the four questions every applicant has before they apply gets read.
The four questions applicants actually have
What does it pay, what are the hours, which room, and what do I need to have. Every other sentence in a childcare posting is decoration, and the postings that bury those four are the ones nobody applies to.
Put the rate range in the first screen. A posting without pay is read as a posting with bad pay, and in a market where the national median is $16.82 an hour for childcare workers, applicants are comparing carefully.
Name the room and the ratio. "Toddler room, 1:5, group of ten" tells an experienced teacher more about the job than three paragraphs of philosophy, and it filters out the people who wanted preschool.
Duties, written as the day
Write the duties in the order they happen rather than as a bulleted abstraction. Greeting families at the door, planning and running activities for the age band, feeding and changing or toileting, supervising nap, keeping the daily sheet, and closing the room.
Say what is shared and what is theirs alone. A teacher who discovers on week two that they are also responsible for the room's cleaning log has learned something you could have told them in the posting.
- Supervision and ratio responsibility, named explicitly.
- Planning for the age band, and how much of it is theirs.
- Records: attendance, daily sheets, incident reports, medication log.
- Family communication: daily, and at conferences.
- Cleaning and sanitizing duties, if they are part of the role.
Requirements, split into must and nice
Split them honestly. The must-haves are usually a minimum age, a background check you will run, pediatric first aid and CPR within a set window, and whatever pre-service training your state requires. Everything else — a CDA, an associate degree, specific curriculum experience — belongs under preferred. Not sure which to ask for? Here is how a CDA compares with an associate degree.
A posting that lists a degree as required when you would happily hire without one is a posting that filters out most of your applicant pool before it starts. If the credential genuinely is required, say why: it is a state rule, or it is a lead-teacher role.
Say who runs the background check
Applicants worry about paying for their own fingerprinting. Saying "we cover the cost of your background check and first aid certification" in the posting removes a real barrier for exactly the candidates who are hardest to reach.
What to say that nobody says
Breaks. Whether they are covered, by whom, and whether they actually happen. It is the single most credible thing a childcare employer can put in a posting, because every experienced applicant has worked somewhere they did not.
Paid training time, paid planning time, and what happens when a colleague calls in sick. These are the terms on which people leave, so they are the terms on which people join.
Then close with the rate again. It is the number they came for.
Sources
- BLS OOH — Childcare Workersfetched 2026-09-04
- Child Care Licensing — Childcare.govfetched 2026-09-04