What it is
Garden leave is what happens once a resignation is in and the current employer decides not to let the departing employee work through some or all of their contractual notice period. Instead of coming into the office, that person stays employed, remains on full pay and benefits, and is instructed to stay away from the business, their colleagues, clients and any successor project until the notice period ends. It is not a suspension and it is not a dismissal. Legally they are still an employee bound by their contract, they simply have no duties to perform for the duration.
Garden leave only exists where the employment contract expressly allows it. There is no statutory right to send someone home on garden leave in the UK or most Commonwealth jurisdictions, so without a clause written into the contract an employer either lets the person work the notice period as normal or negotiates an early release, often with a payment in lieu of notice instead. Length varies with seniority: a few weeks for a standard professional role, but three, six or occasionally more months for a senior executive, portfolio manager or anyone holding client relationships or confidential information a competitor would value. Courts have historically treated garden leave as easier to enforce than a stand-alone non-compete, because the person stays paid and employed rather than being restrained after the relationship has ended.
Garden leave gives you a start date you can trust and a candidate you cannot touch until it arrives.
Why it matters
For a recruiter, garden leave changes what a placement looks like in the weeks between offer acceptance and day one. The start date is unusually fixed and known well in advance, because it is set by contract rather than by how quickly a handover can be arranged. But the candidate is, in practice, out of circulation for that entire stretch: no calls to discuss onboarding, no site visit, sometimes no contact from the new employer at all, because a garden leave clause is frequently paired with a confidentiality or non-solicitation term that survives the move. A consultant who plans a normal pre-start cadence around a garden-leave candidate will find every touchpoint blocked.
It also raises the stakes on discretion. A candidate on garden leave is, by definition, still employed by, and often still paid by, the business they are leaving, and that employer already knows they are going, exactly the position where a counter-offer or a late attempt to renegotiate terms is most likely to surface. The move itself needs to stay quiet until it is public, because a garden leave clause frequently sits alongside restrictions on who the departing employee can be seen talking to. Executive search desks meet this constantly: senior mandates are the ones most likely to trigger garden leave in the first place.
How boilr handles it
boilr logs garden leave as its own no-contact window on the candidate profile, distinct from the notice period it sits inside. Where a standard notice period still allows check-ins, garden leave is flagged as a stretch where outreach should stop entirely, so a consultant is not prompted to chase someone who is contractually unreachable, and no task gets drafted that would risk testing a confidentiality term neither the agency nor the candidate wants tested.
Once the garden leave window closes, a re-engagement task lands automatically on the date contact can resume, so the relationship picks back up on day one rather than depending on a consultant remembering the exact date months later. Because every garden leave case and its length is recorded in the Company Brain, patterns by seniority and sector build up over time, sharpening how the next start date and the cadence around it get planned instead of starting from a guess.
