Recruitment feels informal, a few messages and a couple of interviews, but French law touches every stage of it. The advert, the questions you ask, the notes you take and the way you store the application file all have rules attached, and most of them are limits: what you may not say, what you may not ask and how long you may keep what you collect.
Writing the job ad
An advert must not discriminate. The list of protected grounds in the Labour Code is long and covers, among others, origin, sex, family situation, age, health, disability, religion, political opinion, union activity, appearance and name. In practice, wording that hints at a preferred profile carries risk, whether that is a young and dynamic team, a native speaker when the language is not a real requirement, or a gendered job title with no F/H indication.
Describe the job and its real requirements. Ask for the qualifications and experience the work needs rather than the profile you picture, state the contract type, location, working hours and applicable collective agreement, and make sure everything you say about the role is accurate, because it can be quoted back to you later.
Pay information: what is coming
Directive (EU) 2023/970 on pay transparency had to be transposed into national law by 7 June 2026. France missed the date. The government presented a bill to the Council of Ministers on 10 September 2026, and it is not yet law. As drafted it would require employers to give the pay or the pay range in the job advert, or before the interview when there is no advert, forbid asking candidates about their pay history and forbid clauses that stop employees from discussing their pay.
Until it is adopted those rules do not bind you in France, but the preparation is the same either way: decide a pay range for each role before you advertise. If you cannot say what a role pays, you are not ready to recruit for it. Check the bill's progress before relying on any detail of it.
Interview questions
The Labour Code limits what you can ask. Questions must serve one purpose, which is to assess the person's ability to do the job or their professional skills, and they must have a direct and necessary link with the post. That rules out pregnancy and plans for children, marital status, religion, political or union views and origins, and health beyond what the occupational physician checks later.
Write the questions in advance and ask every candidate the same core set. It gives you a fairer comparison and a record that you stayed on relevant ground. Background checks follow the same logic: a criminal record extract can be requested only where a specific text requires it for the role, and looking at a candidate's public profile is acceptable when it relates to their professional life rather than their private one.
Candidate data
Every CV is personal data, and the CNIL's recruitment guide of January 2023 is the practical reference. Collect only what you need to assess the application. Tell candidates what you do with their data, who sees it and how long you keep it, when you first collect it. When you find someone through a professional network and contact them first, the same duty applies at that first contact, and at the latest within a month.
On retention, the CNIL's position is that data on unsuccessful candidates should not be kept for more than two years after your last contact with them, and only if they have been told. Keeping an application in a talent pool beyond the recruitment it was sent for is a separate choice that candidates should agree to. Then do the deleting: a recruitment mailbox that has never been cleared becomes a store of unlawful data after two years.
Candidates can also ask for a copy of what you hold about them, which includes your interview notes. Write notes you would be comfortable showing the person they describe.
A short checklist
Review job adverts for discriminatory wording and gendered titles.
Set a pay range for every role now.
Prepare a standard question set linked to the job.
Add a privacy notice to your application page or address.
Set a two year deletion rule and put the date in your calendar.
Record who has access to candidate files.
Where AI helps
Drafting adverts, structuring interview guides and turning role requirements into a scoring grid are low-risk uses of an assistant. Mirage Cloud includes an HR agent scoped to recruitment and French labour law, with a PayFit integration for the payroll side. Using AI to rank or reject candidates is a different matter with its own rules, covered in the companion article on screening candidates with AI.
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