Setting up in France: who runs HR before you have an in-house HR team?

Updated: 2 August 2026

What this is about

Foreign companies entering France usually arrange two things quickly: a legal entity and a payroll provider. Both are necessary. Neither runs HR.

Payroll is downstream. It processes the information it receives — salary, hours, absences, variable pay, benefits — and produces payslips and social security filings. But someone first has to make the decisions and produce those inputs.

Who decides how a new employee should be classified? Who prepares the contract and organises onboarding? Who answers an employee asking about leave, remote work or benefits? Who helps a manager deal with declining performance? Who follows an employee returning after a long absence? Who prepares an annual review? Who handles a difficult conversation before it becomes a dispute?

That is HR. And HR does not begin when something goes wrong: it begins with the employee's first day and continues throughout the employment relationship.

In France, it also operates within a particularly structured legal environment. The applicable collective bargaining agreement is determined by the company's main activity, not by choice¹, and it can determine minimum pay, classifications, notice periods and severance terms that override a contract drafted at group level.

The challenge for a foreign subsidiary is therefore not simply to remain compliant. It is to manage employees day to day while making sure that ordinary management decisions work within the French framework. That is the role of an HR Business Partner.

HR is not only compliance

One misconception is worth addressing directly. Because my-people is delivered by a French employment lawyer, it can be tempting to see the service as legal support: someone to draft contracts, review difficult cases and step in when a termination or dispute arises. That is part of the role. It is not the role.

An HR Business Partner works upstream. The objective is precisely to be present before an issue becomes a legal matter: helping a manager prepare a conversation with an employee, identifying why a team member is disengaging, following an absence, structuring objectives, preparing a return to work, checking that workload remains reasonable, or simply answering the everyday questions that employees normally take to HR.

The legal expertise sits behind those decisions. It does not replace HR management. The point is not to turn every HR question into a legal question: it is to make sure that everyday HR decisions are operationally useful and legally sound at the same time.

This distinction matters particularly for small French subsidiaries. If there is no local HR manager, employees and managers still need someone to call. Headquarters cannot realistically manage every local question from abroad. The payroll provider cannot do it because that is not its role. And waiting until a problem becomes serious enough to call external counsel is already too late.

The missing function is not legal advice. The missing function is HR.

What a full HR function actually covers

Outsourcing works only if the scope is broad enough to replace the function that would otherwise sit inside the company. That means covering six areas which work together.

Set-up and compliance

The foundations come first: mandatory registrations, identification of the applicable collective bargaining agreement, required notices and staff registers, working-time arrangements, risk assessment and the other obligations that accompany employment in France. But these are foundations, not the day-to-day function.

Contracts and collective status

Employment contracts and amendments, classifications, internal policies, company rules and company-level agreements. The objective is not simply to produce documents. It is to make sure that the employment framework matches how the business actually intends to operate.

Pay and payroll coordination

Pay policy, compliance with collective minimums, variable remuneration, benefits and welfare schemes, and coordination with the payroll provider. The HR Business Partner remains the interface between the business decision and payroll execution.

Day-to-day employee management

This is the part of outsourced HR that is easiest to underestimate — and one of the most important. Employees need HR support throughout the employment relationship, not only when a document needs to be signed.

That includes onboarding, answering individual HR questions, managing leave and absences, preparing returns to work, changes in working arrangements, remote work questions, working-time issues, salary and classification discussions, annual reviews, career discussions and departures.

It also means maintaining regular contact. In a small subsidiary, there may be no HR office for an employee to walk into. The outsourced HR Business Partner becomes that point of contact: someone who knows the employee, understands the business and follows the relationship over time.

This continuity matters. An absence viewed in isolation is an administrative event. Repeated absences combined with declining performance and a difficult relationship with a manager may tell a different story. A good HR function sees the sequence, not just the individual event.

Supporting managers

Managers also need day-to-day HR support. A Country Manager running a French team should not need to become an expert in French employment law before managing people. They need someone they can call and ask:

Can I change this employee's responsibilities? How should I handle this performance problem? The employee has asked to work remotely from another country — what do we do? Someone has been absent for several weeks; how should I manage the return? I need to have a difficult conversation tomorrow — how should I approach it? Can I grant this bonus? An employee has complained about their manager; what happens next?

These are not exceptional legal events. They are ordinary HR management. The HR Business Partner's role is to help the manager choose the right response, prepare the conversation where necessary, document what needs to be documented and follow what happens afterwards. Sometimes the answer is legal. Often it is managerial. Usually it is both.

Performance and difficult situations

Performance management should not begin when dismissal is being considered. Objectives need to be clear. Feedback needs to be given. Difficulties need to be identified. Support and training need to be considered. Managers need help distinguishing a capability problem from misconduct or from an organisational issue.

Handled early, many situations recover. Handled late, they become legal files. The same applies to interpersonal difficulties, complaints, tensions within a team and early signs of psychosocial risk.

The value of an HR Business Partner is not measured by the number of procedures they run. It is also measured by the number of problems that never need to become procedures.

Staff representation, health and working climate

As the subsidiary grows, the function expands: headcount monitoring, staff representative elections, running the French Works Council, mandatory consultations and collective bargaining. This is not separate from individual HR management — employee relations and collective relations inform each other.

Risk prevention, occupational health follow-up, workload, psychosocial risks and the social climate also belong to the HR function. Some of this is formal: medical follow-up, risk assessment, required procedures. Some of it is not. Regular contact with employees and managers is often how problems are identified before they appear in an absence report, a formal complaint or a resignation. You cannot read the social climate from payroll data; you have to talk to people.

What headquarters sees — and what the French business actually needs

Can a lawyer really be an HR Business Partner?

Yes — provided the service is actually delivered as HR rather than as occasional legal advice. The distinction is important.

A traditional external lawyer is usually called when a question has already become legal: a dismissal, a disciplinary issue, a dispute, a restructuring. An HR Business Partner has a different position in the organisation. They know the employees. They speak regularly with management. They follow ongoing situations. They understand the organisation and its objectives. They participate in decisions before they are made. And they remain available for the ordinary questions that arise every week. That is the model here.

The fact that the HR Business Partner is also an Avocat changes the depth of the service, not its operational nature. There is no hand-off between "HR" and "legal" when a situation becomes sensitive: the same person who has followed the employee and advised the manager already knows the history, the documents and the business context.

And the reverse is equally important. Legal expertise is present during ordinary HR management, before a mistake is made — without requiring every decision to become a formal legal consultation. For a foreign subsidiary without local HR, the combination is particularly useful: one person can operate as the local HR Business Partner while bringing employment-law expertise into the function from the beginning rather than adding it after the event.

Before the function: making the French framework your own

Outsourcing HR does not remove the need for the parent company to understand the environment in which its French subsidiary operates. Someone at group level still approves budgets, headcount, compensation and exits. Those decisions are inevitably influenced by the employment model of the group's home jurisdiction.

The efficient response is not to turn headquarters into French employment lawyers. It is to create a shared reference frame: start from the mechanisms the parent company already understands, then identify what plays the equivalent role in France, what has no equivalent, and where apparently similar concepts operate differently.

Four mappings do most of the work: what replaces termination without cause, how employee consultation fits into corporate decision-making, why a collective bargaining agreement can determine terms the individual contract cannot override, and how autonomy over working time must be organised rather than simply assumed. Our guide to managing in France addresses these questions through the practical situations that produce them.

Once headquarters and the French HR Business Partner share that reference frame, the conversation changes. The question stops being "why can't we do this?" and becomes "how do we achieve the business objective in France?" That is the conversation an HR Business Partner should be having with the business.

Three costly mistakes

Frequently asked questions

Do we need a French entity to employ someone in France?

Not necessarily. Several structures are possible, each with different registration, employment and social-security consequences. The right starting point is therefore not simply "how do we hire?" but what presence does the business want to establish in France, and what obligations come with it? Once that is decided, the employment framework can be built around it.

How is this different from what our payroll provider does?

Payroll processes information; HR manages people and produces the decisions behind that information. If an employee receives a salary increase, payroll processes it — HR helps determine the increase, checks its implications and communicates it. If an employee is absent, payroll records the absence — HR follows the employee, advises the manager, coordinates the return and deals with any consequences. If an employee leaves, payroll produces the final payslip — HR manages the process that leads to the departure. Payroll is a critical HR supplier. It is not the HR function.

What does day-to-day outsourced HR look like?

It should feel much like having an internal HR Business Partner. Managers have a named contact for everyday people questions. Employees have an HR contact when they need one. Regular discussions allow ongoing situations to be followed rather than rediscovered each time an issue arises. The service covers both planned HR activity — onboarding, reviews, compensation, policies, employee representation — and the questions that cannot be planned: an absence, a conflict, a performance concern, a request from an employee or a difficult management decision. The function is external; the relationship is continuous.

Who chooses the collective bargaining agreement that applies to us?

Nobody chooses it. It follows from the company's main activity¹. Identifying it correctly is one of the most consequential decisions at set-up, because it affects minimum pay, classifications, notice, severance and numerous other employment conditions. Within that framework, company-level agreements can then be used to adapt the collective status to the needs of the business.

What happens when we reach eleven employees?

Once the statutory headcount conditions are met, the obligation to establish a French Works Council arises³. This should be treated as an HR project rather than an administrative surprise. The threshold is foreseeable: the electoral process can be prepared, management can understand how the council will operate, and the relationship with employee representatives can be built properly from the beginning.

Is the information we share protected?

Yes, and this is one of the particular features of our model. my-people is a service provided by Convergent, a French law firm. Because the HR Business Partner delivering the service is also an Avocat, information received in that professional capacity benefits from the professional secrecy attached to that status⁴. For management, this is particularly valuable because HR discussions often involve highly sensitive information long before any formal legal issue exists.

Can we bring the function in-house later?

Yes. Where growth eventually justifies a local HR hire, the outsourced function can prepare the transition: role definition, employee files, procedures, policies, calendars, ongoing matters and handover. But that is not necessarily the objective. For many subsidiaries, outsourced HR is not an interim solution — it is the permanent operating model. The relevant question is not "when will we be big enough to hire HR?" but "what HR function does our French business need now, and what is the most efficient way to provide it?"

How we work

my-people is the outsourced HR service offered by Convergent, a French employment law firm. The assignment is carried out by an experienced, English-speaking HR Business Partner who is also an Avocat admitted to the Toulouse Bar.

The engagement starts with a framing phase: understanding the business, the team and the group's HR model; identifying the applicable collective bargaining agreement; reviewing employment contracts, working-time arrangements, payroll configuration, employee representation and compliance; and identifying any immediate risks or priorities. An action plan is then agreed and implemented.

But the service does not stop once the framework is compliant. That is when the HR function really begins. The ongoing service provides day-to-day support to management and employees: onboarding, individual questions, absences, performance, compensation, workload, working arrangements, difficult conversations, employee relations, works council matters and departures. Regular contact means that situations are followed over time rather than addressed only when they become urgent.

The service operates on a fixed monthly fee and the engagement can be terminated at any time.

Discuss your project