Charging cable connected to the rear of a white electric car on a residential street.

EV charging recruitment · France

EV charging recruitment in France

We recruit across EV charging in France, a market that has passed 200,000 public charge points and finished the part everyone can see. Every concession motorway service area has had rapid charging since 2024. What is left is the slower, larger, much harder layer: towns, retail car parks, depots and apartment buildings.

That layer is where the growth rate is falling and where the costs have just gone up. It is also where almost all the hiring is, and unlike Germany, France has never given the work its own name.

Clients we have helped

The niches inside the niche

EV charging is not one market

Public charging, depot charging, the software platforms and the hardware manufacturers all hire differently, and people rarely move between them. Whichever one you sit in, the hiring problem next door is not your hiring problem.

Public charging and CPOs: You are hiring grid connection, siting and field service across an estate that is dispersed by design, and so is everyone you are bidding against for the same people.
Bus, truck and depot charging: If you build the charging, the people who genuinely understand megawatt charging sit with a handful of specialist providers, and you already know who they are. If you run the fleet, the expertise you need is one line inside a generalist operations role, so it has no job title to advertise against.
eMSPs, roaming and charging software: You are hiring like a software business, not an energy one, which means you lose people to fintech on salary before you reach offer. The one thing you cannot hire generically is roaming and protocol interoperability.
Charge point manufacturers: Design is not usually where it hurts. Certification, compliance and the units already in the field are, and the gap that keeps reappearing is embedded firmware and after-sales engineering.
Home and domestic installation: You are not competing with other charging businesses for electricians, you are competing with solar and heat pumps for the same qualified trades, and the qualification itself is becoming the constraint rather than the experience.
Fleet and workplace charging: Almost never its own job title, so when you need it you are hiring out of consultancies and specialist installers rather than from a business that looks like yours. The buyer sits in fleet or facilities rather than energy, which changes who the hire has to convince.

Our Approach

How we work here

Recruitment fundamentals travel. Markets do not. French charging roles are written in French and almost all of them sit under one broad term, IRVE, which covers everything from an installing electrician to a commercial lead. A search in English finds a fraction of the market, and a search in French finds too much of it unless you already know which part you are looking at. We read where the roles actually sit and what the employer is hedging across, because in France that is what tells you a search has already failed once.

Before you brief anyone

Two questions worth answering first

Hiring from outside the sector means persuading somebody to change industry, and that turns on two things most businesses have never written down.

Why should a good engineer come into EV charging rather than any other part of the transition? And why should they come to you rather than the operator down the road?

Most cannot answer either, because most are offering the same things: a growing market, a good team, interesting work. None of that is a reason to move.

A business that hires on skills alone, without knowing whether the person actually cares about the transition, is usually hiring for the same role again sooner than it planned.

Why Hiring Here Is Different

Why hiring here is different from anywhere else

The shortage is real. It has no name.

Germany minted a job title for its constraint. A Netzanschlussmanager is a role you can search for, benchmark and headhunt. France has not done that, and it makes the market genuinely harder to read. Search the French terms for grid connection and you find two dozen roles, almost none of which touch charging. Search for the work in apartment buildings and you find nothing at all. The work is not missing. It is folded inside one very large, undifferentiated family of IRVE roles that covers the installing electrician, the maintenance technician and the commercial lead alike. So you have to read the pattern instead of the title, and the pattern is unmistakable. One maintenance business is running the identical IRVE technician role in Nantes, Marseille, Montpellier, Nice and Le Mans at the same time. A fuel and service specialist is running seven postings across the north and west. An installer is running the same electrician role across four regions. Nobody advertises one job in five towns because they want five people. Underneath it, the economics of exactly this layer got worse this year. The connection rebate ended and the network tariff rose. The distributed layer is where the national target has to be met, it is where the growth rate is already falling, and it is now more expensive to connect. That is the market. Not the motorways, which are done.

Source: August 2026 charging barometer
Source: France passes 200,000 public charge points

Talent Scarcity

Where the pressure is right now

IRVE technicians and installing electricians. The largest block of live roles by a wide margin and the clearest evidence of scarcity anywhere in this market. One maintenance business is running the same title in five cities at once, another seven postings across two regions, a third the same electrician role across four. The work is in small and mid-sized towns everywhere, never on a motorway.

Chargés d’affaires IRVE. The commercial and project lead who carries a distributed site from quote to energisation, and the role most often mistaken for a sales job. In France this person manages the connection, the co-owners or the landlord and the installer at once, which is three relationships rather than one.

Anyone who can run a collective housing project end to end. The grant for apartment buildings rose sharply in April and the obligation on existing non-residential car parks has applied since the start of 2025, so the demand is fixed. The work needs someone who can handle a residents’ association and a network operator in the same week, and that combination is rarer than either skill alone.

Heavy vehicle charging delivery. The national plan calls for roughly 8,000 points across 560 sites at 400kW and above by 2035, and the first megawatt-capable stations are only opening now. As in Germany, the people who have actually commissioned this hardware are a very small group.

Anything that has run past seven weeks. A straightforward French charging hire closes in four to six. Past that the brief is usually the problem rather than the market, and in France the brief is often a title too broad to search against.

Based on live vacancy activity across the French charging market. Reviewed 14 September 2026, updated monthly.

Market Intelligence

The market right now

7 September 2026

Two hundred thousand points, and the rate is slowing

France recorded 200,926 public charge points at the end of August 2026. The year-on-year growth rate has fallen across three readings this year, from 19% to 15% to 13%, and the absolute run rate has fallen with it: 14,544 points added in the first half of 2026 against 19,880 in the same period of 2025. August added 881, the weakest month in the run.

Source: August 2026 charging barometer .
2026

The visible layer is finished

Every concession motorway service area in France has had rapid charging since 2024, with 3,673 charge points on motorway service areas and 71% of them above 150kW. The headline layer is essentially complete. The national target of 400,000 public points by 2030 is about everything else, and closing that gap needs more than 22,000 net new points every six months from here against the 14,544 delivered in the whole of the first half of this year.

Source: Charging on French motorways , Developing charge points for electric vehicles .
3 August 2026

Connections got more expensive twice in one year

The 75% rebate on connection costs for public charging on motorways and inside coordinated deployment schemes applied only to invoices up to 31 December 2025 and was not renewed. Separately, the regulator approved a new Enedis connection tariff schedule in August 2026, effective 28 October, raising costs by roughly 11.3% for low-voltage projects up to 36kVA and 6.8% above that. Both land on exactly the distributed connections the market needs most.

Source: What changes in 2026 for electric mobility , The regulator approves the new Enedis connection tariff .
17 April 2026

The national road network finally has a plan

The transport ministry published a deployment plan for the national road network in April 2026: 30,000 charge points by 2035, made up of roughly 22,000 rapid points for light vehicles across nearly 900 service areas, and roughly 8,000 for heavy vehicles across nearly 560 sites combining 400kW and 800kW-plus charging. Unlike Germany, delivery runs through existing concessionaires site by site rather than one central tender, which spreads the hiring across many organisations instead of a handful.

Source: Charge points on all major routes by 2035 .
15 January 2026

Apartment buildings just got a bigger incentive

From 1 April 2026 the collective housing infrastructure grant rose from €8,000 to €12,500 for buildings up to 100 spaces, with more per additional space and a new additional payment of up to €8,000 for external groundworks. Separately, every publicly accessible point installed or renovated from 8 January 2026 must comply with the vehicle-to-infrastructure communication standard, and the company fleet quota rose to 18% this year on its way to 25% in 2027.

Source: What changes in 2026 for electric mobility .

Market intelligence reviewed 14 September 2026.

TalentPilot

We would rather you needed us less

Most agencies are built so that you call them again. The model only works while hiring stays hard for you, which means nobody selling it has much reason to make it easier.

We took the opposite bet, and not only out of principle. A business that hires well on its own stays a client for years and brings us the roles that are genuinely difficult. A business that depends on an agency resents every invoice and leaves the first time somebody undercuts us. The second kind of relationship is worth less and lasts less long.

So we built TalentPilot. Twenty-one tools across planning, attracting, hiring and keeping people: map the roles before they become urgent, see where the people actually are, write the advert properly, run a consistent interview, and know which of your new starters is at risk before they resign.

And one thing almost nobody has. Every week, the real reasons candidates said no. Not a summary. The actual objections: the money, the location, the counter-offer, the part of the role that put them off. Most businesses never find out, which is why they keep making the same hire the same way.

Everything on this page is one market on one date. Our clients see their own, continuously.

What is left for us is the work that genuinely needs a search. That is the part we are good at, and the part worth paying for.

See how TalentPilot works

How a search runs

You see it as we see it

Before we start: The brief and the target companies are agreed in writing. You know which businesses we are approaching and which we are not, before anyone is contacted.
Every week: The outreach, the response levels, where each person sits in the process, and the reasons anyone said no. The money, the location, the counter-offer, the part of the role that put them off.
When it stalls: You hear it from us. A search that has gone quiet is a conversation about the brief, not a report we delay until you ask.

What happens when you get in touch

A first call is a conversation about your hiring plan. Half an hour, with the consultant who runs this market for us.

We will tell you what we are seeing in your part of it: where the difficulty sits, which roles are moving and what people are actually being paid. You get that whether you decide to work with us or not.

If there is something we can help with, we will say what it would take and roughly how long. If there isn't, we will say so and point you at whoever is better placed.

No slide deck, no pitch, and nobody will chase you afterwards.

For Employers

Build the team that delivers.

Book a Discovery Call

For Candidates

Find your place in the transition.

Explore Open Roles

If you work in this market

What we are seeing from the other side

The same searches, read from the candidate side.

IRVE technicians: You are the most fought-over people in French charging and the adverts do not show it, because your employer is running the same posting in five towns and hoping one lands. That is leverage most candidates never use.
Chargés d’affaires: If you can carry a collective housing or depot project through the connection process as well as sell it, say so explicitly. Most adverts describe it as commercial work and most employers actually need the delivery half more.
People working on heavy vehicle charging: A small group getting smaller relative to demand, with a national plan running to 2035 behind it. Commissioning experience on megawatt hardware is worth stating on its own line.
Where it leads: Technician into supervision and regional management, chargé d’affaires into operations leadership, and anyone who understands the connection process into development. The market is young enough that the route up is shorter than in conventional electrical contracting.

Questions

Clear answers for the next step.

What EV charging roles do you recruit for in France?

IRVE installation and maintenance, chargés d’affaires and project management, electrical and technical design, grid connection coordination, commissioning, network operations, product and software, and commercial leadership. We work public charging, heavy vehicle and depot charging, and the collective housing and workplace installation market.

Is French charging still growing?

Yes, but more slowly each quarter. The year-on-year growth rate has fallen from 19% to 13% across this year and the absolute number of points added in the first half of 2026 was well below the same period in 2025. The national target needs more than 22,000 new points every six months and the market is delivering around two-thirds of that.

Why is grid connection harder to hire for in France than in Germany?

Because France has not given it a job title. In Germany the role exists and can be searched for by name. In France the same work sits inside a broad IRVE job family alongside installation and maintenance, so finding the people who actually do it means reading the content of the role rather than its title.

What happened to the connection cost rebate?

The 75% rebate on connection costs for public charging in coordinated deployment schemes applied only to invoices up to the end of 2025 and was not renewed. The network operator’s own connection tariff also rises from late October 2026. Connecting a distributed site is more expensive this year than last.

Do you cover collective housing and workplace charging?

Yes, and it is a genuinely different market from public charging. The grant for apartment buildings rose sharply in April 2026 and existing non-residential car parks have had an obligation since the start of 2025, so the demand is fixed. The hard part is finding people who can manage a residents’ association and a network operator at the same time.