Hi Paul, as the employment law is quite different in France it might help to get some training or a course in French employment law and procedures. When I first came to the UK I also attended a lot of networking events through LinkedIn and Internations. All the best!

Paul,
Most areas in French HR are strongly driven by the Code du Travail (several thousand pages, with a hundred or more that change every year), so most HR people come into the activity with a law degree in the first place.
Since procedural errors are easy to make in routine areas (and can also be very damaging), a safer area for you to start would be the "softer" parts of HR and more particularly L&D. Target companies that have strong links with the anglophonic world in order to have a "plus" that you can offer. Alternatively, you could also contact major french companies in the UK and make your plans known.

Times are hard at the moment over here with unemployment above 10% so it will not be easy

In reply to Ray:

Always appreciate your 'European' experience, Ray. Thank you :)

In reply to Steve Bridger:

@Steve - "been there,seen it done it" - and will probably still be doing it when I retire next year .....

In reply to Ray:

"...when I retire next year."

To France? ;)

Seriously... people do find it difficult to retire from this community. #family 

In reply to Steve Bridger:

Yup, as a resident of France since 1991 I will retire here in France
Retire from the forum? Not on the agenda - it keeps me in touch with the UK HR pulse and forces me to stay up to date

In reply to Ray:

D'oh! Of course you are.

In reply to Steve Bridger:

Just to add I used to work for a very big frenxh company and was always very surprised at how differently they saw and approached the whole arena of HR to our "Anglo Saxon" ( as they put it) view. I was mildly shocked on more than what be occasion by discussions around equality etc.

Your best bet may well be finding a U.K. Company with a large presence in France or a French company with a large U.K./USA outlook.

In reply to Keith:

To gloss out Keith's helpful remark (with an oversimplification) the different cultural perspective he mentions means that :

• companies focus more strongly on people and less on jobs - organisations are built more around the people resources they already have, and less around adapting the people resources to meet the changing needs
• companies often focus more on collective staff relationships via self-delegated union representatives that the company must recognise and include in staff representative bodies - often when union membership is below 10%...... this tends to produce an adversarial relationship between management and unrepresentative representatives. Compulsory annual negotiations on wages and working conditions can therefore become a charade, that is principally carried out for reasons of legal procedure rather than genuine negotiation
• this focus on "form" can create confusion between equality of opportunity and "identical treatment" of all populations
• a legal, formal distinction between professional staff (cadres) and others such as technicians, supervisors, blue collar, white collar - enshrined in different state pension regimes for these populations. Coupled with a very complex and sometimes contradictory set of employment laws this places a focus on  the "form" as opposed to the underlying issue
• a penchant for "creating within companies "observatory bodies" on things such equality, career planning, social action to reduce overall unemployment in the company's recruitment area, contributions to society at large - usually people by the same unrepresentative representatives 
• an omnipresent State that initially aimed to take care of all pension, medical etc. cover but no longer is in a financial position to do so - but at the same time gives little incentive for companies to provide such cover in a fiscally cost effective way
• a cultural discomfort with the notion of making profit (companies) or money (people) - to exaggerate a little, a scandal in France - when compared to the UK or US - is more likely to focus on money matters and less on morality (marital infidelity for instance). Think  Profumo (Christine Keiler) and Clinton (Monica Lewinski - vs François Fillon receiving a free expensive suit from a contact)
• a notion that a decision is a position that must regularly be revisited and challenged

To an Anglo-Saxon mind this can look like a series of intellectual contradictions, but they all are part of a psyche that is real and different from our own. It is neither better nor worse, and the challenge is to come to terms with it and find the way to make things work from INSIDE this culture - failure to recognise this reality is where many foreigners fail when working in France - or with French people. For me this is part of the challenge of working in France - bringing in "outside ideas" and making them work in a different culture

Rant over - I could go on all day!