Since January 1, 2024, Pôle emploi has become France Travail. This name change has been accompanied by a gradual overhaul of digital tools, registration forms, and job search criteria. By 2026, several regulatory changes, including the transposition of a European directive on salary transparency, will profoundly alter how criteria are entered, both for job seekers and recruiters.
European Directive 2023/970 and France Travail Forms: What Changes Really
The least addressed aspect in official communications concerns the direct impact of European Directive 2023/970 on France Travail’s input tools. This directive, which must be transposed into French law by June 7, 2026, imposes two obligations that will transform the forms.
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First obligation: each job offer must mention a salary or a salary range. Recruiters posting a job through France Travail will have to fill in this field, regardless of company size. Until now, indicating the salary was optional on many job postings. This will no longer be the case.
Second obligation: the salary history of candidates can no longer be requested, including in online application forms. Fields related to previous salary, still present in some application submission processes, must be removed or disabled. To understand the implications for criteria entry at France Travail, one must gauge the extent of the technical adaptation this represents.
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These two changes are not merely cosmetic. They alter the very structure of the data collected during job postings and applications, with repercussions on the algorithmic matching between offers and profiles.
Job Search Criteria: Adjustments for Job Seekers in 2026
For job seekers, the entry of search criteria has already evolved with the transition to France Travail. The registration form now includes more precise fields regarding professional projects, transferable skills, and geographical mobility.
For 2026, feedback from the field varies on the actual fluidity of these digital pathways. Some advisors report that job seekers struggle to translate their experience into skills that can be utilized by the matching algorithm. The issue is not only technical: it pertains to how an atypical career path or a career change is coded into predefined boxes.
The directive on salary transparency will also grant candidates a new right: to obtain the objective criteria used to set the remuneration for a position. This information, which has rarely been accessible until now, could eventually appear in the job offer sheets available on the France Travail platform. The available data does not yet allow for confirmation of the exact timeline for integrating this right into the candidate interface.
BMO 2026 Survey: The Job Market Context Behind the Criteria
The input criteria do not operate in a vacuum. They are situated within a job market whose contours are outlined by the 2026 Workforce Needs Survey (BMO). France Travail announces 2.28 million recruitment projects for 2026, a decrease of 6.5% compared to 2025. However, this slowdown is two times less pronounced than that observed the previous year.
Notable data: less than one recruitment project in two is considered difficult in 2026, at 43.8%, compared to 50.1% in 2025. This decrease in tensions may seem encouraging, but it masks significant sectoral disparities.
The Most Sought-After Professions and Their Link to Criteria Entry
The professions with the highest hiring intentions illustrate the issue of criteria. Among the most sought-after positions:
- Kitchen assistants and versatile restaurant employees, with over 97,000 recruitment projects. These professions require criteria for hourly availability and local mobility that the current form sometimes struggles to capture accurately.
- Café and restaurant servers, with nearly 94,000 projects. The seasonality of these jobs makes the entry of contract duration and availability period criteria particularly sensitive.
- Maintenance agents and home helpers, sectors where geographical criteria and travel constraints play a crucial role in matching offers to candidates.
For these in-demand professions, the precision of the criteria entered by both job seekers and recruiters directly affects the effectiveness of automatic matching. A poorly filled criterion, a geographic area that is too restrictive, or an absent salary range is enough to exclude a candidate from relevant offers.
Unemployment Benefits and Suspension: The Other Side of Entered Criteria
The entry of criteria is not only related to job searching. It also has consequences for the maintenance of unemployment benefits. The active search criteria, the type of contract accepted, and the geographical scope provided by the job seeker serve as a reference during job search checks.
A job seeker who excessively restricts their criteria, for example by refusing any job more than ten kilometers away or excluding certain types of contracts, risks a suspension of their benefits after a formal notice. The line between legitimate criteria and overly restrictive criteria remains blurred in practice, and feedback from the field varies on this point depending on the agencies.
The 2026 finance law has also introduced adjustments in the funding of professional training, which indirectly modifies the pathways offered to job seekers during the entry of their project. The retraining options displayed in the form depend partly on the budgets allocated to training programs, which are reviewed each year.
Professional Training and Project Update
During each monthly update, the job seeker can modify their search criteria and professional project. In 2026, the regular updating of criteria becomes a concrete lever for accessing better-targeted offers, particularly in industrial sectors that show an increase in recruitment.
The transition from Pôle emploi to France Travail is not just a change of name. The overhaul of input criteria, accelerated by European obligations on salary transparency and the evolution of the job market, reshapes the journey of both the job seeker and the recruiter. The coming months will clarify how these new rules will be reflected in the digital interfaces of the platform.