France Travail boosts efficiency in unemployment services and cuts costs on cloud-native databases

The challenge

France Travail was working with a complex IT infrastructure—a multi-layer combination of technologies—that had become expensive, complicated, and difficult to scale. Core services like job listings, benefits management, and document processing struggled to keep up with demand. This made it harder to support millions of people in their job searches. To better assist millions of French citizens in finding employment, the agency needed a faster, more reliable solution to handle high volumes efficiently.

Onboarding new devs was also a major hurdle. The company’s previous system was so complex it took six to nine months for new devs to ramp up—a slow process only worsened by high team turnover. This dragged down DevOps agility and made it difficult for France Travail to respond to changing demands.

To improve efficiency and offer a better user experience, France Travail needed a solution that was both high-performing and user-friendly. “We needed to modernize and shift user habits to leverage technology effectively, all while managing costs,” says Remi-Pierre Pizot, France Travail’s Director of IT. “Our incumbent technologies couldn’t meet these needs, so we turned to Redis.”

Redis powers 50+ use cases—from benefits to job searches

Redis was chosen to simplify France Travail’s complex system requirements, provide Active-Active capabilities, and improve data efficiency by making data ingestion simpler. With Redis, France Travail consolidated 5 to 10 siloed systems and message brokers into one unified platform. The outcome was simpler, smarter tech stack.

Today, France Travail uses Redis for more than 50 use cases related to its mission, whether it be on-the-ground services for citizens, or back-end technical data integration. This covers managing job seeker benefits, running a job portal with e-signatures, and improving the user experience with better APIs.

“Redis has transformed our app functionality and become an essential tool for our devs, helping them work faster,” says Pizot. “By implementing Redis across our platform—integrated into our Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) on TAS and Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS)—we’ve significantly improved our system’s efficiency.”

“Actualization” before Redis

Active-Active supports 10,000 users simultaneously

France Travail uses Redis to simplify and speed up financial benefits for millions of unemployed citizens. France Travail relies on our platform to keep their support system running smoothly, ensuring help reaches those who need it on time.

Active-Active allows France Travail to handle 9,500+ simultaneous actualizations validated within 1 minute users during peak times with continuous data availability and resilience. This setup reduces bottlenecks, eliminates service dependencies, and maintains a faster level of service. Within two weeks of implementation, nearly 7 million users had already benefited.

“Redis offers the speed and scalability needed by our apps, even at our scale and often during periods where the load on the database is at its highest point,” says Pizot.

Active-Active protects against data loss and guarantees a flawless UX. This directly results from clearer pathways between document databases, structured data stores, and message brokers. A robust infrastructure helps France Travail stay reliable and efficient, even under high demand.

Simpler, more resilient actualization with Redis

Redis Streams accelerates document processing to handle peak demands

Redis Streams helps France Travail deliver faster, smarter support for job seekers with real-time updates, simplified document processing, and seamless data integration.

Take, for instance, the process where French citizens can upload one of 180 different document types for their employment apps. In the past, France Travail staff had to manually review these submissions and correct errors when documents were miscategorized—a slow process prone to mistakes. Now, AI, integrated with Redis Streams, automatically verifies and categorizes documents to accelerate the process.

“This shift is more than just efficiency, it’s about satisfaction,” says Pizot. “By making things easier for citizens and allowing France Travail employees to focus on more valuable work, we’re improving the overall quality of our services. We’re showing that the right technology can make a concrete impact on the usage and experience of our solutions”

The combination of Redis Streams and automation means that teams can better handle peak organizational demands, even during high-volume periods. This includes generating PDFs and transmitting data across systems for more transparency throughout the network.

Simplifying systems for faster, smarter, & scalable transformation

Redis gave France Travail the power to move fast and transform how it operates. It unlocked a more personalized user experience, optimized DevOps, made document processing fast, and streamlined user interactions with less lag and more efficiency.

By switching from a complicated legacy system to Redis, dev onboarding dropped from six to nine months to just one week. Read speeds doubled, write speeds increased fourfold, and processing times became much faster across the board. Response times saw major improvements: electronic signatures now take 5 seconds instead of 5 minutes, and PDFs generate in 1 second instead of 30 minutes.

The shift to Redis also helped France Travail cut costs and scale up operations. The organization now runs at just one-third of its previous costs, freeing up resources for other key priorities.

Next, France Travail plans to add a GenAI job agent to make job matching faster and support more personalized services. Features like a conversational assistant for France Travail agents and automated document recognition will improve efficiency and enhance the overall user experience. Redis is playing a key role in France Travail’s global product transformation, helping them to create a faster, more reliable system to help French citizens find jobs.