Professional Interview: HR Guide

The professional interview (entretien professionnel) is a mandatory meeting between an employer and each employee in France, focused on the employee’s career path and development prospects rather than performance evaluation. Introduced by the 2014 vocational training reform and codified under article L.6315-1 of the French Labor Code, it applies to every company regardless of size, with reinforced obligations above 50 employees. This guide covers its frequency, content, employer obligations, and how HRIS software can help secure its tracking.

What is the professional interview

The professional interview is a discussion dedicated exclusively to the employee’s development prospects: internal mobility, a change of role, a career change project, or training needs. It must never be confused with a performance review, even though many companies choose to hold both back to back to limit the number of meetings.

This requirement was introduced to give every employee regular visibility into their professional future within the company, and to make employers accountable for maintaining their teams’ employability. Before the 2014 reform, only some industry-wide agreements provided for this type of discussion; lawmakers generalized the obligation to counter skill obsolescence in the face of technological and organizational change. The content of the interview is not fixed by law: each company can build its own template, provided it covers the topics required by the Labor Code.

In practice, the professional interview is also a tool for social dialogue: employee representatives can request an aggregated, anonymized summary of the interviews held, particularly during negotiations on workforce and skills planning (GEPP, the French term for strategic workforce planning). This link between the individual interview and the collective management of skills is often underestimated, even though it is one of the main benefits the company can expect from the process.

Which employees are covered by the professional interview

Every employee is covered, with no seniority requirement and regardless of contract type: permanent contract, fixed-term contract, part-time, or employees on a day-rate agreement. The professional interview must also be systematically offered when an employee returns to work after an extended absence, even when that return happens before the two-year deadline:

• Return from maternity leave or parental leave
• Return from a sabbatical
• Return from long-term sick leave
• Return from a union mandate
• End of a secure voluntary mobility period

This particular case, often overlooked by HR teams, deserves special attention: the return-to-work professional interview must be offered to the employee even if the previous interview took place less than two years earlier. The same applies to an employee elected as an employee representative or holding a union mandate, who additionally benefits from a start-of-mandate interview meant to identify skills useful for carrying out the mandate and how they will be factored into the employee’s career development.

Tracking these special cases is one of the main sources of error found during labor inspections: without a dedicated tool, HR teams frequently forget to trigger the return-to-work interview, because there is no automatic alert tied to the employee’s return date.

How often must the professional interview be held

The general rule requires a professional interview every two years for each employee. This frequency can be adjusted by an industry-wide or company-level collective agreement, provided it still reflects a regular follow-up of the employee’s career path. The starting point for the two-year count is the employee’s hire date, or the date of the previous professional interview once one has already taken place: an employee hired in March 2024 must therefore receive their first interview before March 2026, then a new interview every two years from that date.

This individual calculation, specific to each employee, becomes hard to manage manually once headcount grows beyond a few dozen people: deadlines spread out across the whole year rather than falling on a single date, which is why many companies still choose to align the professional interview with a single annual campaign, even if it means slightly moving some individual deadlines forward or back.

The six-year review

Every six years, the professional interview is accompanied by a comprehensive review of the employee’s career path, sometimes referred to as the “career path interview” (entretien de parcours professionnel) in the labor administration’s recent communications. This review checks that, over the period, the employee has received the required professional interviews and at least one concrete action among the following: completing a training action, acquiring a certification element through training or validation of prior experience, or a salary or professional progression. It is this six-year review, not each interview taken in isolation, that triggers the penalty for non-compliance in companies with 50 or more employees.

Concretely, a company with 80 employees that has properly held an employee’s three biennial professional interviews, but where no non-mandatory training was completed over the six years, is still at fault at the time of the review: simply holding the interviews is not enough — the employee’s career path must have genuinely moved forward as well. It is this dual criterion, interviews held and a real development action, that separates formal compliance with the obligation from actually meeting it.

What are the employer’s obligations

The employer must organize the professional interview on the company’s own initiative, without waiting for a request from the employee. The employee must be invited within a reasonable timeframe, the summary must be put in writing, and a copy must be given to the employee. Commitments made during the interview, particularly regarding training, must be genuinely followed up: a commitment left unfulfilled from one interview to the next weakens the company’s position in the event of an audit or litigation.

How to formalize and keep the summary

The Labor Code does not impose a specific template, but it does require the summary to be written and handed to the employee. In practice, a solid summary covers at least the date of the interview, a review of the employee’s path since the previous interview, their development wishes, the training actions being considered with an indicative timeline, and the signature of both parties or, failing that, proof it was delivered. These records must be kept for at least the full six-year cycle, since that is the period covered by the comprehensive review; many companies choose to keep them even longer, in case of litigation involving older facts.

Penalties for non-compliance

In companies with at least 50 employees, if the six-year review shows that the employee did not receive the required professional interviews and at least one non-mandatory training action, the employer must make a corrective payment into the employee’s personal training account, equal to 3,000 euros. This corrective payment is made by the employer to the Caisse des dépôts et consignations, which manages the personal training account, not directly to the employee: it increases the training rights the employee can draw on, without going through payroll. This financial penalty is in addition to the risk of labor court claims: the absence of a professional interview can be used by an employee to establish that the employer failed in its obligation to keep them fit for their role, even outside the 50-employee threshold.

Professional interview vs. annual review: what is the difference

Confusion between the two interviews is common, even though their purposes are distinct. The table below summarizes the main differences.

In practice, many companies combine the two interviews into a single session to reduce the administrative workload on managers, provided the two components remain clearly distinguishable in the summary, in order to keep proof that the legal obligation tied to the professional interview was met.

How to prepare and conduct the professional interview well

The quality of the professional interview depends largely on how well it is prepared, on both the employee’s and the manager’s side.

Best practices for the employee

The employee benefits from thinking ahead about how they feel in their current role, their short- and medium-term development wishes, and the skills they would like to develop. Performance review software that lets the employee prepare for the discussion in advance, through a questionnaire sent a few days before the meeting, helps produce a more constructive conversation. It also helps to look into internally open positions and available training options, such as the personal training account, before the interview: an employee who arrives with concrete ideas is more likely to secure specific commitments from their employer.

Best practices for the manager

For the manager, the professional interview calls for a different posture than the annual review: the goal is to listen to the employee’s project rather than to evaluate them. A manager who is not properly prepared tends to slide back into a standard performance review, which strips the interview of its legal purpose and weakens the company in the event of an audit. Managers benefit from a short training session or, failing that, a guided template built into the HRIS, reminding them of the mandatory topics and the questions to avoid during this specific type of interview.

The role of HRIS software in tracking interviews

A dedicated module can automatically schedule interviews as they come due for each employee, alert managers and HR in case of delay, and keep a history available for the six-year review. This centralization reduces legal risk and makes it easier to manage the training actions that result from the interviews, in connection with the company’s skills development plan. It also makes it possible to automatically aggregate data to produce the indicators expected by employee representatives during GEPP negotiations, without manually re-entering individual summaries. It is part of a broader HR digitalization effort that touches every HR process, from payroll to recruitment.

Frequently asked questions