Structured hiring for organisations where process and compliance are non-negotiable.
Professional services firms don't treat hiring casually - and your ATS shouldn't either. Treegarden brings approval workflows, compliance tools, structured interviews, and full audit trails to every hire you make.
Professional services has specific hiring needs
The gaps that standard ATS tools leave open.
Consulting, law, and financial services firms evaluate software with the same scrutiny they apply to every other procurement decision. These are the problems that generic tools consistently fail to solve.
A senior hire requires sign-off from three partners before the role can be posted. That process takes two weeks because it lives in email chains with no tracking, no reminders, and no record of who approved what.
You're managing external collaborators - search firms, headhunters - who need visibility into specific candidates without access to the full platform. There's no clean way to share candidate profiles selectively and securely.
You know you need to conduct structured reference checks on every senior hire. The process is manual, undocumented, and inconsistently applied. Nothing is captured in the system. Nothing is auditable.
When something goes wrong in a hire, there's no audit trail. You cannot reconstruct who saw which candidate profile, who made which decision, or on what grounds a candidate was rejected. That gap becomes a liability.
Compliance & governance
Five features your legal and compliance teams will ask for by name.
Multi-Level Approval Workflows
Configure approval chains appropriate to the seniority and sensitivity of each role. A junior analyst hire may require only line manager approval; a senior partner hire may require a panel review followed by HR sign-off. Each approval is time-stamped, attributed to the approver, and permanently recorded. Reminders are sent automatically when approvals are pending.
Approval chain - Senior Consultant (London)
Line Manager - T. Whitfield
Approved 28 Feb, 09:14
ApprovedManaging Partner - C. Delaney
Approved 28 Feb, 14:02
ApprovedHR Director - P. Sharma
Reminder sent 1 Mar, 08:00
PendingFinance sign-off
Awaiting previous step
WaitingFull Audit Trail
Every action taken in Treegarden is logged with a timestamp, the identity of the user, and a description of what changed. Who viewed a candidate profile. Who moved a candidate between stages. Who sent a rejection email, and when. Who approved a role posting. The complete decision history of every hire is permanently accessible.
Activity log - Candidate: A. Hartmann
GDPR Compliance Built In
Data protection is not an optional add-on or a bolt-on compliance module - it is part of the platform architecture. Candidate consent is tracked at the point of application. Data retention policies can be configured to your organisation's requirements. The right to erasure is supported with a complete and auditable deletion workflow. Data can be exported on request.
GDPR controls
Consent tracking
Recorded at application, timestamped, accessible by candidate name or date
Data retention
Configurable retention periods; automated expiry notifications before purge
Right to erasure
Full deletion workflow - documented, audited, irreversible - available per candidate
Data portability
Full candidate data export on request in machine-readable format
Reference Check Management
Structure your reference check process so that it is consistent, documented, and auditable across every hire. Track the status of each reference request - sent, received, completed - against the candidate record. Document referee responses within the platform. Treegarden includes FCRA-compliant workflows for US-based teams, with consistent documentation standards applicable to all jurisdictions.
Reference checks - A. Hartmann (Senior Consultant)
Dr. J. Blackwood
Former employer - Apex Advisory
M. Eriksson
Professional peer - NordicCap Group
S. Iyer
Direct manager - Vertex Partners
Role-Based Access Control
Six configurable user roles govern precisely what each person in the hiring process can see and do. An external search firm can view the specific candidate profiles you have shared with them - and nothing else. A hiring manager can review and evaluate candidates for their open roles. Only the HR director sees the full picture across all roles, all candidates, and all teams.
Permission matrix (selected capabilities)
Consistency across every hire
Structured hiring is not a best practice. It is a standard practice.
Ad hoc interviews, undocumented feedback, and decision-making by gut feel introduce both legal risk and poor hiring outcomes. Treegarden enforces structure without adding friction.
AI-generated structured interview questions
Treegarden's AI generates role-specific interview question frameworks. The same questions, in the same order, used by every interviewer - ensuring comparable evaluations and a defensible process.
Collaborative evaluation and centralised feedback
Multiple interviewers submit structured feedback against the same candidate, in the same system. All notes are centralised, attributed, and date-stamped. No feedback is lost in email. No decision is undocumented.
@mention colleagues on specific candidates
Tag a partner, practice lead, or subject matter expert directly on a candidate's profile for rapid input. The notification reaches them in Slack or email. The response is recorded in the platform.
Decision history per candidate
A complete record of who recommended advancement, who raised concerns, and on what grounds, is maintained for every candidate at every stage. That history is accessible long after the hire is complete.
EEO & diversity reporting
The data you need to demonstrate fair hiring practices.
EEO-1 report generation
Generate EEO-1 category reports directly from applicant data. No manual aggregation. No spreadsheet manipulation.
Applicant flow logs
Detailed applicant flow data - by stage, by role, by hiring manager - with demographic breakdowns where data is provided.
Demographic data tracking
Capture self-reported demographic information in a structured, compliant manner. Data is stored separately from evaluation records.
"Professional services firms are increasingly subject to scrutiny - from clients, investors, and regulators - regarding diversity in hiring and promotion. Treegarden makes it straightforward to capture the data, maintain its integrity, and report against it."
AI bias detection is also built into the job description editor. Before a role is posted, Treegarden's AI flags language that may inadvertently discourage applications from qualified candidates - covering gender, age, cultural, and disability bias indicators.
"Compliance is not optional in our sector. We needed approval workflows, an audit trail on every hiring decision, structured reference checks, and GDPR tooling - all documented and accessible. Treegarden had all of it. The multi-level approval chain alone saved us from three near-misses in the first month. We can now show any client or regulator exactly how a hire was made."
External search partners
Work with headhunters and search firms without compromising data integrity.
Executive search and specialist recruitment firms are a standard part of the professional services hiring toolkit. Treegarden has a dedicated role for external collaborators - controlled visibility, no sensitive data exposure.
Secure candidate share links
Share individual candidate profiles with external search firms via a secure, time-limited link. Access can be revoked at any time. The profile share is logged in the audit trail.
Controlled visibility
The External Collaborator role provides access only to what has been explicitly shared. Your full candidate pipeline, salary data, internal notes, and other roles remain entirely private.
Full audit of external access
Every profile view by an external collaborator is logged. You have a complete record of which search firm saw which candidate profile, and when - without relying on their own reporting.
Compliance-ready from day one
Everything your compliance and operations teams require.
Hire with the same rigour you apply to everything else.
Book a demo to walk through the compliance and governance features in detail. We will map them against your specific requirements.