Why Our Clients Stay: Retention Data and What It Means

Pear Tree maintains a 90% talent retention rate, well above the roughly 60% offshore industry average (Outsource Accelerator 2024), and that is the main reason clients stay. When an offshore team member stays for years rather than months, an Australian or New Zealand business keeps the institutional knowledge, avoids repeated rehiring costs, and builds a genuine team. Across 750+ companies, retention is the metric that compounds.

What is Pear Tree's retention rate, and how does it compare?

Pear Tree's talent retention rate is 90%, compared with a roughly 60% average across the offshore industry (Outsource Accelerator 2024). That 30-point gap is the single clearest signal of how our model differs from the traditional agency approach, and it is measured over placements with 750+ Australian and New Zealand companies rather than a handful of case studies.

Retention is not a soft metric. It is the percentage of placed talent still in their role over time, and it is the number that determines whether a client keeps getting value or keeps starting over. A high figure means the people we place are staying, which is the outcome every business actually wants when it hires.

Why does talent retention matter to the client?

Talent retention matters because client retention follows it directly. When your offshore hire stays, the relationship works, the knowledge accumulates, and there is no reason to look elsewhere. When offshore hires churn every few months, the client carries the cost of that churn and often blames the model rather than the provider.

This is why "why our clients stay" and "why our talent stays" are the same question. A team member who has spent two years learning your systems, your clients, and your standards is worth far more than a cheaper replacement who has to start from zero. Retention is the mechanism that turns an offshore hire into a long-term asset.

What drives Pear Tree's 90% retention rate?

Fair pay, the direct-hire model, rigorous vetting, and genuine inclusion drive the 90% rate. The foundation is fair pay: talent that is paid properly for its market stays, while talent that is underpaid leaves, which is exactly why the traditional model, marking talent up three to five times what they earn (Outsource Accelerator 2024), produces such high churn.

The rest builds on that. Pear Tree screens 200–400 applicants per role to shortlist 3–5 candidates, so the fit is right from the start. The direct-hire model means the person works for your business with full transparency, not for an agency taking a margin. The table below sets out how these factors compare with the industry norm.

How does retention affect the cost of offshore hiring?

Retention affects cost more than the headline rate does, because every departure carries a hidden bill. Recruiting, onboarding, and training a replacement consumes weeks of lost productivity and management time, and a role sitting half-empty is a role not delivering. A cheaper hire who leaves in three months is more expensive than a fairly paid hire who stays for years.

The productivity side compounds the point. Well-managed offshore teams reach 90–95% of onshore productivity (McKinsey and Deloitte 2024), but only once they are established in the role. Constant churn keeps a team permanently in the low-productivity ramp-up phase, so poor retention quietly erodes the savings that made offshore hiring attractive in the first place.

Does remote work help or hurt retention?

Remote work helps retention when it is managed well. Remote workers are 2.5 times less likely to leave than office-based workers, with turnover of around 4% against 10% (Owl Labs 2025), and 76% of companies report better retention from remote arrangements (remote work research 2025). Distance is not the enemy of retention; neglect is.

The lever that matters most early on is onboarding. Effective remote onboarding increases retention by 82% and productivity by 70% (BambooHR 2024), which is why Pear Tree invests in a structured one-to-two-week onboarding for every placement. Get the first fortnight right and the odds of a long-term stay rise sharply.

What does high retention mean for a business over five years?

Over five years, high retention means a compounding advantage that low-retention competitors never build. A team that stays accumulates institutional knowledge, needs less supervision each year, and delivers more per person as it matures. A business cycling through hires every year keeps paying to rebuild what it already had.

Pear Tree has operated for more than five years, long enough to see this play out. Clients who started with one or two offshore hires and kept them have grown those into settled, senior teams, while the savings held because the roles never had to be re-recruited. Retention is what lets an offshore team become part of how the business runs rather than a revolving experiment.

How does Pear Tree protect retention from day one?

Pear Tree protects retention through fit, onboarding, and a genuine safety net. The six-step hiring process is designed to place the right person rather than the fastest one, and structured onboarding gets them productive and settled within one to two weeks. Fair local-market pay keeps them motivated to stay.

The safety net is the six-month replacement guarantee: if a placement does not work out, we replace the hire at no additional cost. It matters that this is rarely needed, because a 90% retention rate means the great majority of placements simply keep working. With offices in Sydney, Auckland, Cebu, Manila, Cape Town, and Hawke's Bay, Pear Tree supports both the client and the talent throughout, which is what keeps both from leaving.

Key takeaway

Clients stay with Pear Tree because their talent stays, and talent stays because of fair pay, careful placement, and real support, producing a 90% retention rate against a 60% industry average. Over time that retention compounds into institutional knowledge, lower rehiring costs, and a settled team, which is the outcome that makes offshore hiring genuinely worthwhile for Australian and New Zealand businesses.

AUTHOR BIO: Frank Kight is Co-Founder of Pear Tree, a direct offshore talent placement company helping Australian and New Zealand businesses hire world-class Filipino and South African professionals, without the agency markup. Frank leads operations and talent sourcing across the Philippines and South Africa, where retention starts with fair pay and the right placement. With offices in Sydney, Auckland, Cebu, Manila, Cape Town, and Hawke's Bay, Pear Tree has placed talent with 750+ companies and maintains a 90% retention rate.

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