Hiring Your First Employee in France: The Complete Checklist

Hiring your first employee in France is the point where a lot of founders discover that the country's reputation for administrative complexity is not entirely unfair. It is manageable. It is just longer than people expect, and several steps have to happen in a specific order.

Here is the sequence.
Before you write a contract
Identify your collective agreement. This is the step people skip, and it causes the most trouble later. Almost every French business falls under a convention collective determined by its activity, identified by an IDCC number. The agreement sets minimum salaries by classification, trial period lengths, notice periods, holiday rules and often additional benefits.

You do not choose it. It applies to you. And it overrides your contract wherever it is more favourable to the employee, so writing a contract before reading it is writing a contract you may have to redo.

Find your IDCC before anything else.

Decide the contract type. A CDI is the open-ended default. A CDD is fixed-term and only lawful for specific listed reasons, such as replacing an absent employee or a genuine temporary increase in activity. Using a CDD because you are unsure whether the role will last is not a valid reason, and a CDD used improperly can be reclassified as a CDI by a tribunal.

Set the salary against the right floor. The applicable minimum is the higher of the SMIC and your collective agreement's minimum for that classification. Budget for employer contributions on top of gross salary, which for a standard role add roughly 40% to 45%, reduced at lower salary levels.
The formalities
File the DPAE. The déclaration préalable à l'embauche goes to URSSAF and must be filed in the eight days before the employee starts. It is a single declaration that covers several registrations at once. Missing it is a serious matter, not a paperwork slip.

Write the contract. A full-time CDI does not legally require a written contract, but working without one is a bad idea and your collective agreement may require it anyway. A CDD must be written and given to the employee within two working days of starting.

Set the trial period correctly. For a CDI the statutory maximums are two months for employees and workers, three for supervisors and technicians, and four for cadres. Renewal once is possible only if your collective agreement permits it and the contract provides for it. Get this wrong and you lose the ability to end the contract simply.

Open the registre unique du personnel. Every employer must keep one, from the first employee. It records identity, job, contract type and dates.

Arrange the medical visit. The visite d'information et de prévention has to happen within three months of hiring, and sooner for certain roles.

Set up the mutuelle. Employer-provided health cover is mandatory and you must pay at least half the premium. Cadres also require prévoyance cover.

Put up the mandatory notices. Working hours, safety information, the collective agreement reference, the labour inspectorate's contact details and anti-discrimination notices all have to be accessible to staff.
What changes as you grow
Thresholds trigger new obligations. The most significant early one is 11 employees, which requires a CSE, the staff representative body. Others follow at 20 and 50. Worth knowing the map before you approach a threshold rather than after.
Where first-time employers get it wrong
Skipping the collective agreement. Discovering six months in that your agreement mandates a higher minimum, a thirteenth month or a shorter trial period is expensive and awkward.

Getting the trial period wrong. An incorrectly drafted or improperly renewed trial period is one of the most common defects, and it removes your main flexibility in the first months.

Treating a CDD as a low-commitment CDI. Reclassification is a real risk with real consequences.

Copying a contract from the internet. Most templates online are either generic or drafted for a different collective agreement. Use one as a structure, not as a document.

Forgetting the medical visit. It is easy to miss and it is a compliance failure.
Making this less painful
The genuinely hard parts here are judgement calls: which contract type fits, how to classify the role, what the trial period should be. Those benefit from a professional.

The rest is finding out what applies to you, which is mostly a research problem. AI tools scoped to French employment law can shorten that considerably, because the questions are narrow and the answers are documented. Mirage Cloud includes an agent covering recruitment and French labour law, and integrates with PayFit, which is where the payroll side of this ends up anyway.

Use it to understand what applies, draft the first version, and prepare your questions. Then have someone qualified check anything you are going to sign. The AI Act now classifies AI used in recruitment and employment decisions as high-risk, with obligations applying from December 2027, which is another reason to keep a human making the actual decisions.

The whole process takes about a week if you work through it in order. It takes months if you discover the collective agreement last.

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