KEY HIGHLIGHTS
- Most offshore staffing providers run on disposable hiring with high churn.
- Offshoring could contribute $61 billion and create 969,000 jobs by 2030.
- 100% of employees surveyed say Outposter is a Great Place To Work.
In most offshore staffing companies, losing a client often means losing your job. That’s the legacy model that still dominates the Philippines BPO sector runs on a 90s playbook of underpaying labour, cycling through people fast, and treating headcount as someone else’s problem the moment a contract ends.
Angelo joined Outposter in 2020 for a single role. Six years on, he has worked across five different positions in three client environments, with earnings roughly 40% higher than when he started. Two of those internal moves happened because his clients changed operating models. Instead of a final payslip, he got a coaching plan and a new desk inside the same company.
Outposter founder and CEO Ben Pullen has built his company in deliberate opposition to that approach, and the results are extraordinary.
The current offshore staffing model is broken
Recent industry reporting shows the Philippine IT-BPM sector ended 2025 with more than $40 billion in export revenues and about 1.9 million workers, and IBPAP is now targeting $42 billion in revenues and 1.97 million full-time employees in 2026. That scale suggests the market is no longer just large; it is increasingly mature, diversified, and ready for more stable, career-led staffing models.
However, Pullen believes that much of the industry still operates on what he calls disposable hiring. “Disposable hiring is when a workforce model is built around short-term convenience instead of long-term people outcomes,” Pullen says. “It usually means high churn, low investment in development, and replacing people instead of growing them.”
The damage compounds quietly. “Over time that destroys trust. Staff stop feeling connected to the business because they know they’re viewed as temporary. Performance becomes inconsistent because ownership and loyalty disappear. Eventually clients feel it too. Stable customer experiences are very hard to build on top of unstable employment models.”
Basically, if your customer service rep has mentally moved on by month four, you will see it in your CSAT scores by month six.
Building careers worth keeping
The first big decision was committing to full-time employment over freelance or gig structures and everything else flowed from that.
“From there we invested heavily into retention, leadership, training, flexibility, and career development rather than simply optimizing for recruitment speed,” Pullen says. “We also introduced programs like O-Pera and internal learning pathways because if you genuinely want long-term careers, you need to support people both professionally and personally.”
Outposter now operates more like a real employer with a five-year plan for its people.
How Outposter handles offshore staffing churn
Pullen calls it redeployment over replacement. When a client contract ends or restructures, Outposter’s first move is to find the employee another seat inside the network.
“A big part of making that work has been investing into our internal academy and modular learning systems,” he says. “That allows people to quickly upskill or cross-skill into adjacent opportunities, whether that’s Loan Processing, Real Estate support, animation, leadership, or other specializations. The goal is to build adaptable careers, not roles that only exist while one client contract does.”
There is quiet commercial logic in this. Redeployed staff are already inside the culture and the systems, so onboarding new clients gets faster.
Take John, who joined as a Junior Developer before getting curious about cybersecurity. Outposter funded the retraining and the exposure. He now works in InfoSec, a field with stronger demand and meaningfully higher earning potential. In a disposable model John’s curiosity would have been somebody else’s problem.
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Three questions every CHRO should ask
Pullen is candid that the behavioral signals showed up first. “You start seeing people genuinely care, contribute ideas, mentor others, and think long term because they believe the business is thinking long term about them too,” he says.
Then the operational metrics follow. Outposter has been independently certified through Great Place To Work, which uses the Trust Index to measure how employees actually experience their workplace across credibility, respect, fairness, pride, and camaraderie.
For Pullen those results function as a check on his own narrative. “Our Great Place to Work results have also been incredibly valuable because they give us a genuine benchmark on trust, culture, leadership, and how our people actually feel about working here.”
The founder and CEO has also created a litmus test for any leader wondering whether their offshore staffing model is built to last.
“First: if this employee’s client disappeared tomorrow, would we genuinely try to redeploy them, or immediately look for the exit?”
“Second: are we investing in this person’s long-term growth, or only in the minimum required for today’s role?”
“Third: would our own leadership team willingly work under the same conditions we expect our offshore teams to accept?”
If your offshore staffing model couldn’t survive your team asking Pullen’s three questions at the next offsite, that’s the work to start on Monday morning. Because building great workplaces for all doesn’t pause at the border.
Frequently Asked Questions About Offshore Staffing
What is offshore staffing?
Offshore staffing is when a company hires full-time team members in another country to handle business functions like finance, customer support, development, or back-office operations. Done well, offshore staffing gives businesses access to skilled talent and stable cost structures while creating long-term careers for the offshore workforce. The model only delivers consistent quality when offshore employees are treated as permanent hires with proper contracts and progression pathways.
Is traditional offshore staffing broken?
The core issue is what Outposter CEO Ben Pullen calls disposable hiring. Workforce models are built around short-term convenience and high churn gets normalized. Staff are treated as interchangeable labour and development investment stays minimal. The result is unreliable client experiences and weak loyalty. Companies that treat offshore staff as strategic employees with full-time contracts and proper career pathways consistently outperform high-churn vendors on retention and customer satisfaction.
How is Outposter different from a typical offshore staffing provider?
Outposter runs a career-first offshore staffing model built on full-time employment and internal redeployment when client contracts change. The company invests in an internal academy and modular learning systems so employees can cross-skill into new specializations like InfoSec or Loan Processing. Independent Great Place To Work certification benchmarks its trust and leadership results against the wider industry and gives clients a transparent view of workforce experience.
How do you know if your offshore staffing model is broken?
Pullen suggests asking three honest questions. If a client vanished tomorrow, would you redeploy the employee or push them out? Are you investing in long-term growth or only today’s role? Would your own leadership team accept the conditions you expect offshore staff to work under? Uncomfortable answers usually mean your offshore staffing model is leaking trust and loyalty somewhere along the line.
Does career-first offshore staffing save money?
The trade-off is real. Career-first offshore staffing absorbs more upfront cost on training and redeployment. Companies routinely underestimate how expensive churn and disengagement become once compounded over time. Stable teams produce better customer outcomes and develop future leaders internally. Treating offshore staff as strategic full-time employees with proper progression typically delivers stronger commercial performance over a multi-year horizon than running a high-churn vendor model.
