APEC is France's association for executive employment, and its board is the reference place for cadre roles. Who is on it, what the free account and ADEP agreement involve, and which vacancies belong somewhere else.
The board for cadre roles in France
APEC is the Association Pour l’Emploi des Cadres, the association responsible for executive and managerial employment in France, and its job board is the reference place for those roles. Cadre is a defined status in French employment law rather than a loose word for senior, and the board is built around that status: it carries cadre vacancies, and the people reading it are cadres or on their way to becoming one.
You do not have to take the scale on trust. APEC’s own candidate page showed 94,572 ads online when we read it on 2026-08-12, a figure it prints twice on the same screen. That is the file your vacancy joins — large, and of exactly one kind.
Two documents before the first ad
APEC takes nothing from a third-party tool until two things exist in your company’s name: an APEC account, and a signed ADEP agreement authorising publication on your behalf. Neither carries a charge. That is worth saying out loud, because the word “agreement” makes most people brace for an invoice, and the assumption that a fee is attached is the usual reason employers put this off.
Both are one-time. Signed once, they stay signed, and every later ad goes out without anyone opening APEC again. What goes wrong is sequencing: starting the paperwork on the morning a cadre vacancy opens, then watching the rest of your channels go live while this one waits on a signature. Do it in a quiet week, before you need it.
What it costs
Nothing, without qualification. There is no product to buy on this board: no duration to choose, no upgrade, no rate card. The catalogue lists it as organic in France, which is why this page has no price table when most of the directory does.
The other side of that is there is no way to buy prominence either, because there is nothing to buy. An ad here is found because somebody goes looking for the role, not because it was put in front of them, and that pace suits a considered career move far better than an urgent backfill.
Where it fits
For a cadre role in France, once the ADEP agreement is signed, there is genuinely no argument against being on APEC. Run it alongside a paid generalist rather than in place of one. Including it costs nothing, so the only thing left to settle is the access, which is why this page spends a section on it.
Two cases rule it out, both clear-cut. Hiring outside France: coverage stops at the border and nothing else is on offer. And hiring below cadre level: a technician, hourly or shop-floor role filed here sits among executive listings and gets read by the wrong audience. Costing nothing does not make a board harmless; it only makes the wrong channel cheap.
How to post a job to APEC
- APEC needs an account and agreement in your name first — Join cannot do this step for you.
- Write the vacancy once in Join.
- Publish the vacancy. Because APEC supports organic distribution, Join sends it there organically by default as part of your Join subscription.
- APEC receives the ad and publishes it on its own schedule.
- Applications land in your Join pipeline alongside those from every other channel.
Who it suits
executive, finance and engineering roles do best here.
It is a specialised board, and that cuts both ways: inside those families the audience is unusually well matched, and outside them there is little point posting at all.
Posting via Join
APEC is one of the 10+ organic boards Join distributes to at no extra cost. Publish once in Join and the ad appears there alongside every other channel you have selected.
APEC is organic in the Join catalogue for France: once the ADEP agreement is signed, your ad goes out with the rest of your channels at no media cost instead of being keyed into a separate site by hand. Join handles the connection; the account and the agreement stay in your name, because APEC requires that.
