Recording job interviews in France: Penal Code consent, Labour Code notice and CNIL rules

Recording a job interview with a candidate in France is lawful only if the candidate is told in advance and agrees. Article 226-1 of the Penal Code punishes recording, without the speaker's consent, words spoken in private or in confidence, with up to one year in prison and a 45,000 euro fine, and the Labour Code separately requires that candidates be told expressly, before they are used, about the recruitment methods applied to them and bars collecting information through any device the candidate was not told about. The CNIL, France's data protection authority, adds that keeping the audio or video of an interview is not normally necessary at all. This is the position as of October 2026.

This page adds France to our country series on interview recording, alongside Germany, the UK, Canada and Australia. What France adds that those pages do not is a Labour Code rule written specifically for candidates, and a regulator that has published detailed advice on video interviews and how long to keep them.

The French rules at a glance

Is it a crime to record a conversation without consent in France?

It can be. Article 226-1 of the Penal Code punishes, with one year's imprisonment and a 45,000 euro fine, intentionally intruding on the private life of another by capturing, recording or transmitting "words spoken in a private or confidential capacity" without the consent of the person who spoke them (our translation). Unlike the US one-party rule, being a participant does not authorize you to record the other person.

The article also contains a presumption that matters in practice: where the recording is made openly, with the knowledge of the people concerned, and they did not object although they were able to, their consent is presumed. A 2008 ministerial answer to a parliamentary question applied this to recorded phone lines where callers were told and could refuse, and said that where callers have no way to refuse, consent cannot be presumed (Assemblée nationale, question 17430). Whether a job interview is "private or confidential" speech in the statute's sense is not settled by the text, so do not rely on it being outside the offense. Announce the recording before anything is captured, give the candidate a real choice, and get an explicit yes rather than relying on silence.

What does the Labour Code require before you record a candidate?

The Labour Code has a short set of rules written for recruitment, and they apply whether or not the recording would be a crime:

• Article L1221-6: information requested from a candidate may only be used to assess their ability to do the job or their professional aptitudes, and must have a direct and necessary link with the job or that assessment.
• Article L1221-8: the candidate is "expressly informed, before they are used, of the recruitment methods and techniques used in respect of them"; the results are confidential; and the methods must be relevant to the purpose pursued (our translation).
• Article L1221-9: no information about a candidate may be collected by a device that was not brought to the candidate's attention beforehand.

The CNIL reads these together as ruling out evaluation "by surprise": because the law makes no exception to prior information, techniques used without the candidate's knowledge do not comply (CNIL recruitment guide, fiche 11). A recording or transcription tool is a device in this sense, so the candidate has to know about it before the interview starts, not halfway through.

What does the CNIL say about recording video interviews?

The CNIL published a 19-part recruitment guide on January 30, 2023 (CNIL, Le guide du recrutement). Its fiche on video in recruitment speaks directly to recording interviews (fiche 12):

• Keeping the audio or video is the exception. As with in-person interviews, no retention of the video and sound streams appears necessary for interviews held by video conference, unless the recruiter can justify a specific need.
• Check default settings. Recruiters should pay particular attention to tools that record sessions by default, especially outsourced ones.
• One example of a justified recording is a recruitment agency interviewing candidates to preselect a few for a client that was not in the meeting. Even then, retention should follow the recruiter's real needs and, without a particular justification, should not run past the hiring decision.
• Tell candidates first. Before any processing, the recruiter must say that a video tool will be used, why, and how recording and later viewing will work, along with the usual GDPR information.
• Prefer minimal tools, and check that the tool does not process candidates' data for purposes unrelated to recruitment or send it outside the EU without a legal framework.

For the candidate's file more generally, the guide's retention fiche suggests keeping an unsuccessful candidate's application for up to three months after the process to explain the decision, up to two years from the last contact for a talent pool with the candidate's consent, and up to five years from the hiring decision in archived form to defend a discrimination claim (fiche 9). Those periods are for the file; the recording itself should be kept far more briefly, if at all.

Which GDPR rules apply to the recording and the transcript?

An interview recording or transcript is personal data, so the GDPR applies in full: a lawful basis under Article 6, the information in Article 13 at the time of collection, data minimization, a retention limit and the candidate's rights. The CNIL's guide notes that the results of tests and other recruitment methods are personal data covered by the right of access (fiche 7), and a transcript, like any personal data, falls under Article 15. A request must generally be answered within one month (Article 12(3)). If an AI tool evaluates candidates, Article 22 limits decisions based solely on automated processing, and a data protection impact assessment under Article 35 is likely; see our guide to legitimate interest in recruitment for choosing the basis and the candidate privacy notice template for the Article 13 fields.

Does the CSE need to be involved?

Usually. Under Article L2312-38, the social and economic committee (CSE) must be informed, before they are used, about the methods or techniques used to help recruit candidates and any change to them; informed before automated personnel management processing is introduced; and informed and consulted before the employer decides to use means or techniques that allow employees' activity to be monitored. A recording or AI note-taking tool for interviews is a recruitment technique, and because it also captures your interviewers, it can be a monitoring tool too. Brief the CSE before the launch, not after.

What if you interview a candidate in France from the US?

If the job is in France, the employer is bound by the Labour Code's prior-information rules wherever the interviewer sits, and the candidate is speaking from France, where the Penal Code applies. A US recruiter who normally works under one-party consent should apply the French standard on these calls: tell the candidate in the invitation, repeat it at the start, get a clear yes, and offer to continue without recording. Whether the GDPR applies to a US company with no EU establishment depends on Article 3; an agency or employer established in the EU is covered under Article 3(1). The simplest course is to follow the GDPR on every candidate in France. For the US side of the call, see is it legal to record a job interview.

Can you use AI note takers or transcription?

Yes, within the same rules, and the CNIL's guide gives two warnings that apply directly. First, a tool's outputs, including any scores it derives, must have a direct and necessary link with the job. Second, the guide says that the reliability of results drawn from facial micro-expressions has not been corroborated by serious scientific studies, so such analysis should be set aside in recruitment (fiche 12). Keep to transcription and note-taking, check where audio is processed, and remember that scoring or ranking features can bring in the EU AI Act's rules for recruitment systems (the EU AI Act for recruiting).

Tools can help with the mechanics. Interview Signal, for example, joins no call as a bot, shows a read-aloud consent line and has a one-click pause, and does not keep audio after transcription; the transcript is still personal data, so the rules above still apply.

A consent line for interviews in France

Adapt this and read it before anything is captured:

Avant de commencer : je souhaiterais [enregistrer / transcrire avec
un logiciel] notre entretien, afin de pouvoir me concentrer sur vous
et noter fidèlement vos réponses. [L'enregistrement / La transcription]
servira uniquement à ce recrutement et sera supprimé(e) [délai] après
la décision. Êtes-vous d'accord ? Vous pouvez refuser ou demander une
pause à tout moment, sans aucune conséquence sur votre candidature.

(Before we start: I'd like to [record / transcribe with software] our
interview so I can focus on you and capture your answers accurately.
The [recording / transcript] will be used only for this recruitment and
deleted [period] after the decision. Do you agree? You can say no or ask
to pause at any time, with no effect on your application.)

Put the same information in writing in the interview invitation, to meet Article L1221-8's "before" requirement. More wording options are in our interview recording consent script.

Checklist before you record interviews in France

• The candidate told in writing, before the interview, that it will be recorded or transcribed, and why (L1221-8, L1221-9).
• A clear yes obtained at the start of the call, and a real alternative offered with no consequence.
• A documented reason why a recording, rather than notes, is needed; default recording switched off otherwise.
• A lawful basis chosen under Article 6 GDPR and the Article 13 information given.
• Recordings deleted no later than the hiring decision unless a specific need is documented.
• The CSE informed, and consulted where the tool can monitor staff (L2312-38).
• No emotion or micro-expression analysis; scoring features checked against Article 22 GDPR and the EU AI Act.

Hiring in more than one EU country? Compare Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Ireland.