Open Data Lakehouse powered by Apache Iceberg
Public Sector
France
Transforming Employment Services: France Travail's Data Journey
France Travail, formerly Pôle Emploi, is the foremost authority in the French job market. As a national public institution under the Ministry of Labor, France Travail guides registered job seekers back into employment and addresses businesses' recruitment needs.
It’s an important but complicated job. With a workforce exceeding 55,000 employees and a network of 900 agencies and local offices, data is critical. This mission requires collecting, processing, and disseminating data related to the labor market and unemployment benefits.
France Travail serves as the state's operational arm to reach an important goal: full employment nationwide.
Making data accessible to France Travail advisors
France Travail's primary challenges include facilitating the return to employment of its 5,385,400 registered job seekers in July 2024 while providing guidance to companies searching for candidates. In other words, France Travail acts as a bridge between candidates, job listings, and recruiters. However, more than 100 disparate and fragmented data sources feed into the institution's data lake on a daily basis. These diverse data sources may contain information related to professional activity reports, career paths, and application logs.
"The challenge for France Travail was to organize, store and share this vast amount of data effectively, allowing this new knowledge to be seamlessly integrated into the technologies used by our agents," Mr. Thomas Duriez, operational manager of Big Data Infrastructure, France Travail.
The goal was to provide the most suitable, almost "turnkey," support to ensure the best possible understanding of job seekers' career paths and profiles.
France Travail also needed to ensure that all advisors and partners could effectively deploy and utilize new data resources. Now that data-driven practices are widespread within France, the agency must meet expected standards for data privacy. The ongoing objective is to offer businesses the best candidates and job seekers the most appropriate training and job opportunities that best match their career path and profile.
Managing and controlling the data lifecycle
Cloudera and France Travail have a long-standing partnership dating back to 2014. This project expanded and upgraded the platform, adding new capabilities for data governance, real-time, machine learning and AI. The expansion demonstrates the ongoing trust in Cloudera’s ability to provide comprehensive multi-service solutions that align closely with France Travail’s business needs.
"Cloudera has met all of our operational goals and technical key performance indicators KPIs outlined in the project specifications, both in our political commitment to achieving full employment and in our efforts to modernize our data and analytics infrastructure," continues Mr. Thomas Duriez, operational manager of Big Data Infrastructure, France Travail, "Furthermore, given France Travail's governmental affiliation, it was imperative to ensure complete data sovereignty. We must store, secure and manage data within our borders. Cloudera is unique because it is the only truly open-source platform on the market. With an open data lakehouse powered by Iceberg, we can have secure control of all of our data – and all the capabilities we need in one platform."
From a functional perspective, France Travail needed to collect, store, and secure heterogeneous data, making it accessible to business applications. Cloudera offers a key advantage in this area, as the platform includes capabilities to gather data from any source, analyze with machine learning and AI, and share information, all while ensuring unified security.
While stability and scalability were pivotal, other factors affirmed Cloudera as a trusted partner for France Travail. Among its numerous advantages, Cloudera features for data governance include a control manager, which offers comprehensive oversight of the entire data lifecycle.
Transitioning to real-time data analysis
Designed to span five years, this project has brought France Travail within reach of its structural transformation goals. The data-driven tools provided to advisors have exceeded expectations, making more data available and impacting many critical processes and outcomes.
Moreover, the average number of opportunities available to job seekers has increased; instead of just a single job offer, they now have access to a broader array of opportunities matching their profile and skills.
Other outcomes include:
Detecting fraudulent job offers, protecting job seekers and agency resources
Conducting more detailed profile and resume/CV analyses
Optimizing career paths, for happy employees and employers
The organization also uses more machine learning and AI, to deliver equanimity in employment processes.
"With the help of Cloudera, we provide equal access to services for all by using an AI model that flags potential discrimination risks," adds Mr. Thomas Duriez, operational manager of Big Data Infrastructure, France Travail. "Our agents are now closely aligned with job seekers and companies, deeply understanding their respective needs."
The partnership between the two entities is ongoing. The key to France Travail’s data sovereignty goals is using Iceberg, the open table format for data, and moving to more object storage. This decision clearly demonstrated the intention to transition to industrialized real-time data processing that benefits the entire country and economy.
