The NDA showed up in our inbox on a Tuesday. Seventeen pages. A family in Los Angeles wanted their new house manager to sign it before even interviewing. The document was so broad it essentially prevented the candidate from ever discussing that they’d worked for this family, mentioning the family’s neighborhood, or describing any aspect of household operations to anyone, ever, including future employers during reference checks.
The candidate we’d presented was perfect for the role. Fifteen years of experience with high-profile families. Impeccable references. Genuinely excited about the position. She read the NDA and withdrew her application immediately.
The family was shocked. They thought the NDA was standard protection. What they didn’t realize was that their attorney had written a document so restrictive it signaled to experienced household staff that this family was going to be a nightmare to work for.
Let’s talk about NDAs in household employment, because families need to understand what these documents actually protect, what they can’t legally restrict, and why sometimes the way you approach confidentiality tells candidates everything they need to know about what working for you will be like.
What Families Think NDAs Protect
Most families want NDAs because they value privacy. Totally reasonable. If you’re high-profile, wealthy, or just private people, you don’t want your house manager telling stories about your home life at dinner parties. You don’t want your housekeeper posting on social media about what she saw in your bedroom. You don’t want your personal life becoming gossip.
NDAs seem like an obvious solution. Sign this document, and everything that happens in our home stays in our home. Simple, right?
Except it’s not simple at all. What families usually want is discretion, professionalism, and basic respect for privacy. What they often get from their attorneys is a nuclear confidentiality agreement written as if they’re protecting state secrets. The gap between “please don’t gossip about us” and “you can never mention this job existed” is enormous, and that gap is where good candidates disappear.
We’ve been placing household staff in Los Angeles for over twenty years. We understand why families want confidentiality protections. We also understand why experienced professionals run from overly broad NDAs. The families who get this balance right end up with loyal, discreet staff. The ones who don’t end up cycling through employees who either don’t care about boundaries or are desperate enough to sign anything.
What NDAs Actually Can’t Do
Here’s what a lot of families don’t realize: there are legal limits to what you can restrict in an NDA, especially for household employees. Your attorney might write whatever they want into a document, but that doesn’t make it enforceable.
You can’t prevent an employee from reporting illegal activity. If your house manager witnesses something criminal, no NDA can legally silence them. You can’t prevent them from cooperating with law enforcement or regulatory investigations. You can’t restrict them from discussing their own working conditions, wages, or treatment when talking to attorneys, government agencies, or even other potential employers in the context of explaining their experience.
You also can’t prevent them from providing factual information about their job duties and responsibilities when applying for future positions. If your house manager spent three years managing a 15,000 square foot estate with a staff of five, coordinating events for 100 people, and overseeing a million dollar annual budget, they need to be able to tell prospective employers those facts. An NDA that prevents them from ever describing what they did professionally is unenforceable and a huge red flag.
The NDAs that hold up in court are narrow and specific. They prevent disclosure of genuinely confidential information like financial details, security systems, family schedules, personal health information, and business dealings. They don’t prevent someone from ever mentioning they worked for you or describing their general job responsibilities.
When your attorney writes an NDA so broad it tries to restrict things that aren’t legally restrictive, experienced household staff see it for what it is: a document written by someone who doesn’t understand household employment and a family who’s going to be unreasonably controlling.
Why Top Candidates Walk Away
The house manager we mentioned earlier didn’t walk away because she wasn’t willing to be discreet. She walked away because the NDA told her that this family didn’t trust anyone, didn’t understand reasonable confidentiality, and was likely to be impossibly demanding about boundaries that didn’t need to exist.
When you present an NDA before you’ve even met a candidate, you’re signaling that protecting your privacy is more important than building a relationship based on mutual respect and trust. You’re treating them like a security risk before they’ve done anything to earn suspicion. The best household staff have options. They don’t need to work for families who start the relationship with suspicion and legal threats.
We’ve placed staff with celebrities, billionaires, and public figures who require serious confidentiality. Know what the best ones do? They have conversations about discretion during interviews. They explain why privacy matters. They ask about the candidate’s approach to confidentiality. They build trust first, then formalize it with a reasonable NDA after someone’s been hired.
The families who lead with legal documents instead of human connection lose candidates who’d actually be naturally discreet and loyal. You’re selecting for people who are either desperate or don’t have better options. Neither category is likely to give you the quality of employee you actually want.
The Timing Problem
There’s a massive difference between asking someone to sign an NDA after you’ve offered them a job and requiring one before the first interview. One is reasonable protection of your privacy once you’ve decided to bring someone into your home and life. The other is treating every applicant like they’re already untrustworthy.
We worked with a Los Angeles family who required every candidate to sign an NDA before scheduling an interview. They were confused about why they weren’t getting qualified applicants. When we explained that top-tier household managers weren’t signing legal documents just to have a conversation, they were offended. They thought they were being careful.
What they were actually doing was eliminating every candidate with enough experience to know that wasn’t normal or reasonable. The people who did sign were either new to the industry and didn’t know better, or they’d been turned down by enough families that they were willing to sign anything to get an interview. Neither group was the experienced professional the family claimed to want.
Timing matters. An NDA after a job offer is standard in high-privacy households. An NDA before you’ve even met someone is paranoid.
What Reasonable NDAs Look Like
We’ve seen hundreds of NDAs over twenty years. The ones that experienced household staff will sign without hesitation are usually three to five pages, clearly written, and focused on specific categories of genuinely confidential information.
They typically cover financial information about the family, business dealings the employee might become aware of, security systems and protocols, family schedules and travel plans, personal health information, and details about minor children. That’s all reasonable. Nobody’s arguing families don’t have a right to protect that information.
Good NDAs also explicitly state what they don’t cover. They confirm the employee can describe their general job duties, responsibilities, and professional accomplishments when seeking future employment. They confirm the employee can provide factual information to government agencies if needed. They confirm the NDA doesn’t prevent reporting illegal activity.
The best NDAs we’ve seen include sunset provisions. Maybe confidentiality about certain things lasts forever, but restrictions on discussing job duties expire after two years. Maybe financial information remains confidential indefinitely, but information about the family’s daily schedule is only restricted while employed. These nuances show the family understands the difference between protecting legitimate privacy and unnecessarily restricting someone’s ability to work in their field.
When a family presents a reasonable NDA with clear scope and sensible restrictions, good candidates sign without drama. It’s the seventeen-page documents written in impenetrable legalese that try to restrict everything including things that can’t legally be restricted that make people run.
The Social Media Panic
NDAs in household employment have gotten more aggressive since social media became ubiquitous. Families are terrified their staff will post about them, photograph their homes, or share details of their lives online. That’s a legitimate concern in 2024.
But the solution isn’t an NDA that tries to control every aspect of an employee’s social media presence. We’ve seen NDAs that prohibited household staff from having public social media accounts at all, required approval before posting anything online even on personal accounts about personal topics, and demanded access to employees’ social media passwords. That’s not protecting your privacy, that’s controlling another adult’s entire digital life.
What actually works is clear policies about photography and social media in the employee handbook, combined with a narrow NDA clause about not posting identifiable information about the family, home, or work. You can reasonably restrict someone from posting photos of your home, your children, or anything that identifies you. You can’t reasonably restrict them from having Instagram or posting about their own life.
The families who handle this well have conversations about social media expectations during hiring. They explain their concerns. They ask about the candidate’s social media habits. They make clear what’s off-limits. Then they trust the person they hired to be professional. And you know what? It usually works fine.
The families who try to control every digital aspect of someone’s life usually end up with staff who resent the intrusion and find ways around the restrictions anyway. You can’t control people into loyalty. You build it through mutual respect.
When NDAs Backfire Entirely
We’ve watched families lose great employees over NDA disputes that never needed to happen. An estate manager leaves after five years, provides generous notice, and offers to help train their replacement. The family demands they sign an even more restrictive NDA before leaving, threatening legal action if they don’t. The estate manager, who’d been completely professional and discreet for years, hires an attorney and the whole thing becomes an expensive mess.
Or a house manager applies for a new position and the prospective employer calls for a reference. The previous family refuses to provide any information, citing the NDA, even though the house manager just needs confirmation of employment dates and job responsibilities. The house manager loses the opportunity because they can’t get a reference, and they’re furious at the family that’s now actively hurting their career.
NDAs are supposed to protect privacy, not weaponize it. When families use NDAs to punish departing employees, prevent them from getting future work, or retaliate for normal professional moves, they create enemies who might have stayed allies. The household employment community is smaller than you think. Word gets around about families who use legal agreements as weapons.
The Reference Check Problem
This is where NDA overreach most commonly blows up. A candidate you’re considering worked for a high-profile family who required an NDA. You call for a reference. The previous employer refuses to confirm anything beyond employment dates because of the NDA. Now what?
From your perspective as the hiring family, that’s frustrating and suspicious. Why won’t they tell you anything about this person’s work? From the previous employer’s perspective, they’re protecting their privacy. From the employee’s perspective, they’re being punished for the previous family’s paranoia.
Reasonable NDAs address this by explicitly allowing the employee to provide references with limited, factual information about their role and performance. Maybe references can confirm job title, dates of employment, general responsibilities, and whether they’d rehire the person. That gives you useful information without compromising the family’s privacy.
Unreasonable NDAs try to prevent any communication about the employment at all, which makes it impossible for good employees to get future jobs. Guess what happens? Those employees either don’t sign, or they sign and ignore it, or they leave the industry entirely. None of those outcomes help you find good staff.
What This Means in Practice
If you’re a family in Los Angeles or anywhere else who values privacy and wants confidentiality from household staff, you’re not wrong to want an NDA. You’re wrong if you think the solution is the most restrictive document your attorney can write.
Start by having your attorney draft something reasonable that focuses on genuinely confidential information and doesn’t try to control things that aren’t legally controllable. Have someone who actually understands household employment review it. We’re happy to do that for families we work with. If experienced candidates are reading your NDA and running away, that’s a sign the document is the problem, not the candidates.
Think about timing. Don’t require NDAs before first interviews. Have conversations about discretion during the interview process. Present NDAs after you’ve made an offer, as part of the employment agreement package. Treat it as a formality that protects both parties, not as a test of whether someone’s willing to sign away their rights to get a job.
Be clear about what you’re actually protecting and why. If you’re a public figure and you’re genuinely concerned about privacy, say that. Explain the specific concerns. Most experienced household staff have worked in high-privacy environments and they understand. What they don’t understand is being treated like criminals before you’ve even met them.
Building Discretion Without Documents
Here’s what we’ve learned after twenty years: the most discreet household staff are discreet because of who they are, not because they signed a document. The NDAs are backup, not the primary protection.
You build discretion by hiring people with good judgment and strong character. You reinforce it by treating them with respect and trust. You model it by being discreet yourself about their personal lives and private business. You maintain it by creating a professional environment where loyalty is earned through mutual respect, not extracted through legal intimidation.
The families with the most loyal, long-term, genuinely discreet staff are usually the ones who worry the least about NDAs because they hired well and treated people well. The families constantly fighting NDA battles are usually the ones who hired poorly, treated people poorly, or both.
An NDA can’t fix bad judgment in hiring. It can’t compensate for treating staff like they’re untrustworthy. It can’t create loyalty where there’s no respect. It’s a legal document, not a relationship builder.
If you’re relying on an NDA to keep your staff from talking about you, you’ve already lost. If you’re using an NDA as reasonable protection in a relationship built on mutual trust and respect, you’re probably fine and your staff won’t resent signing it.
The Bottom Line
NDAs in household employment aren’t the problem. Unreasonable NDAs presented at the wrong time to intimidate candidates into compliance are the problem. Know the difference.
If you want to attract and retain top-tier household staff in Los Angeles or anywhere else, focus on being the kind of employer that people want to work for and stay loyal to. Have reasonable confidentiality protections. Build relationships based on trust. Treat legal documents as formalities that protect both parties, not as weapons to control people.
And if you’re losing good candidates because of your NDA, listen to that feedback. Your attorney might think they’re protecting you. They might actually be costing you the exact employees you need.
