Find French companies that are hiring or changing director: BODACC and France Travail for prospecting

A company that is hiring is growing. A company with a new director is about to review its tools and suppliers. In France, both moments are published, dated and free to consult. This guide shows how to find them in two official sources, BODACC and France Travail, and how to avoid the traps that send a message to the wrong company.

Why start from public data?

A bought list tells you who matches your target. It does not tell you who needs you now. Job offers and legal announcements are dated events. They give you a reason to write to one company this week rather than another, what we call a buying signal.

They have two more qualities: they are free, and they are official. No database to buy, no record two years out of date.

Which sources should you use?

How do you find companies that are hiring with France Travail?

France Travail, the French public employment service, offers a free job offers API. You create an application on its developer portal, add the API to it, then query offers with three useful filters:

• the NAF code, for example 69.20Z for accounting firms;
• the département, up to five at a time;
• recency: offers published in the last 7 or 31 days.

Each offer also carries the establishment's headcount band, so you can keep companies of your size.

Not every offer in a sector is a signal for your offer. In our campaigns, after these filters, 29% of the offers reviewed were kept as a real buying moment for the target, 49 out of 170. Sorting is still essential, but the material is there.

How do you spot new directors with BODACC?

BODACC, the official bulletin of civil and commercial announcements, publishes every day as open data, with no key. Each announcement belongs to a closed family: creation, registration, modification, sale, insolvency proceedings, removal. That closed vocabulary is what makes sorting simple: no AI is needed to know what an announcement is about.

The new director

A change in management names the person who becomes president, manager (gérant) or managing director. That is the person to contact.

The new company

A company that has just been registered has everything to set up. Keep companies, and drop sole traders and non-trading companies (sociétés civiles) if they are not your target.

The moved head office and the acquisition

A new head office often signals growth. The purchase of a business brings a new owner, with the same reset as a new director.

How do you link an offer or an announcement to the right person?

The public company registry (the French government's company directory) is free and needs no key. You look a company up by name and postcode, or directly by SIREN for a BODACC announcement. It gives the company's size and its list of directors.

Three rules avoid most mistakes:

• Require the same NAF code as the offer. A short name easily lands on another company: for us, a name of a few letters first matched an unrelated holding.
• Keep natural persons. When the director is a company, a holding for instance, there is nobody to write to. Drop statutory auditors too.
• For an announcement, take the person it names, not the first president listed in the registry.

How many companies should you handle per day?

Few, and well. We cap at about 20 companies per target per day. At that pace, a person can review every signal before any message goes out, and the first message can talk about what just happened.

For what comes next, writing and following up are covered in our guides to B2B prospecting and sales prospecting.

Is it GDPR compliant?

This data is public, but its use is still regulated. In France, B2B prospecting is allowed without prior consent when the message concerns the recipient's professional role. Say where the information comes from, here a dated legal announcement or job offer, and let the person object easily. A refusal applies to all your campaigns.