A CHEER went up and everyone in the job centre clapped. After months on the dole, Jean-Yves Ichallal, a salesman, had found work and was beaming with pleasure. Strangely, his gratitude was directed at Britain.

Having long derided Britain’s economic vigour as free market savagery, the French have quietly called in expertise from across the Channel to help to bring down their unemployment. Ichallal, 42, was one of hundreds to have benefited this year.

“I am really pleased,” he said last week at the job centre set up in January by Action for Employment, or A4e, a Sheffield-based company. “Without the computer training I received here I would still be unemployed.”

A4e, which played a leading role in Gordon Brown’s “welfare to work” programme, has been contracted by the French government to help to find 5,600 jobs in the next two years.

It has kept a low profile in France: the private sector’s intrusion into what was hitherto a state preserve has outraged the unions which argue that business should not be making money out of the unemployed.

The fact that les rosbifs are profiting – the company gets paid up to £2,000 for each person it places in a job – makes it that much more objectionable to the old-fashioned French left, for which new Labour is anathema.

Eric Aubin of the General Workers’ Confederation called it “scandalous” and predicted that the programme would fail. “These people have no incentive to provide stable, lasting jobs for the unemployed. Only the public service does,” he said.

Even so, A4e, which operates only in the Val de Marne district near Paris, is hoping to expand, providing a more significant British boost to President Nicolas Sarkozy’s mission to get France working again.

“Sarkozy wants to reduce unemployment to 5% from the current 8% over the next few years,” said David Bailey, the company’s strategic sales director. “There’s an understanding in France that things have to change.”

Tucked away in an office block in Créteril, just outside Paris, Bailey has assembled a staff of French “counsellors” eager to be taught the “Anglo-Saxon” methods for cajoling workers off welfare. Hedoes not believe in the stereotype of France, with its 35-hour working week, as a nation of slackers but bemoans a lack of “flexibility” and says generous state benefits for the unemployed – who are entitled to about three-quarters of their last salary for 23 months after being made redundant – can sap the will to work.

As he was talking, in walked Caroline Smith-Darrigrand, a 34-year-old Briton who has lived in France for a decade. She received a lump sum of 10 months’ salary from an oil company after taking redundancy this year and has since become a mother. On top of the redundancy payment, she also receives 70% of her salary each month from the state.

“If I didn’t want to work it would be fine,” she said. “That’s the difference between Britain and France. You get lots of things here when you’re unemployed. But I want to have a career. Now that I’ve had the baby I want to go back to work.”

Rachida, a young counsellor at A4e, believes a job will soon be found for Smith-Darrigrand, a modern languages graduate from Birmingham University. The company has placed 433 people in work this year.

The formula that worked so well in Britain has had to be tailored to French sensibilities – the term “customers” was replaced by “candidates”, for example. There is more behind the strategy than sympathy and free coffee, however: applicants are trained in writing CVs, computer skills and interview techniques. “We’ll even buy clothes for them if they don’t have something to wear at an interview,” said Bailey. “And we’ll pay for a taxi if they don’t know how to get there.”

The debt-ridden state agency that has had the monopoly on trying to get people back to work is not known for exerting much pressure on job seekers, who are entitled to 30 days’ “holiday” each year. A rule against turning down more than two job offers is seldom enforced rigorously.

The British company, by contrast, has little patience for candidates who balk at job offers. “We call it tough love,” said Bailey. “We say to them, ‘Look, what’s going on here? There’s this job, a good job, so get real’.”

Ichallal did not need the “tough love” speech. He accepted the first offer. “I hated being unemployed,” he said. “Now, thank God, it’s over.”

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