How Protech built a 10-person Fiji team with less than 1% staff turnover over three years

About Protech

Protech is one of Australia's largest privately owned recruitment and labour-hire firms, specialising in technical and professional roles. Founded in Brisbane in 2006, the business now operates 22 offices nationally with a turnover exceeding $300 million and a field workforce of over 300 employees. At that scale, operational efficiency isn't a preference — it's a commercial imperative.

Why Fiji

Protech's competitive edge sits in the quality of their people. When Simon Gibson, Regional Manager, assessed outsourcing options, Fiji stood out for reasons beyond cost. The Fijian workforce brings strong English proficiency, a natural aptitude for customer service, and higher average education levels compared to many competing offshore markets.

The logistics worked in Fiji's favour too. Aligned with Australian time zones, close enough to Brisbane to make in-person training practical, and genuinely desirable as a destination for visiting staff, the setup removed many of the friction points that make offshore arrangements difficult to sustain.

"Working for Protech is seen as a prestigious white-collar opportunity in Fiji, comparable to working for Microsoft or Google."

That employer brand status in Fiji isn't incidental. It drives the quality of candidates Protech attracts and contributes directly to the retention outcomes they've achieved.

How the partnership was built

Protech started conservatively, with a two-person admin support team handling data entry, document scanning, and system notes for their recruiters onshore. The process was well-documented from day one, which made training faster and expectations clearer.

To manage workflow at scale, they introduced Freshdesk as a ticketing platform, allowing the offshore team to track, prioritise, and resolve requests with defined SLA targets for each ticket type. The operations management team travelled to Our Pacific Office to conduct direct training before going live.

From that foundation, the team grew to 10 FTE, expanding into advertising administration and end-to-end recruitment process support. The scope has widened significantly without the team losing pace on performance.

The challenges they worked through

Not everything went to plan. As Protech's business expanded, payroll integration issues emerged between their CRM and front-end systems. A project initially scoped for three months stretched to three years. It's a candid detail Simon shares openly, because the flexibility of cost-effective offshore scaling is precisely what allowed them to sustain the project without it becoming commercially prohibitive.

The lesson isn't that outsourcing is without complexity. It's that having a capable, stable team in place allowed Protech to work through that complexity without it derailing operations.

Performance and what drives it

The numbers are strong. Through Freshdesk, the Fiji team managed 15,000 tickets in a single year, achieving a first response SLA of 90% and a resolution SLA of 93%. Staff turnover over three years has remained below 1%, against an industry standard significantly higher and an onshore turnover rate at Protech of 15%.

Simon attributes the results to a deliberate management philosophy: the Fiji team is not treated as contractors at arm's length. They sit within Protech's reporting lines, are managed by a Brisbane-based manager, and are included as genuine members of the wider business. That integration creates accountability, motivation, and the kind of engagement that shows up in performance data.

"We've gone beyond seeing the Fiji team as contractors, integrating them as essential team members, directly managed and included in our reporting lines. This inclusive approach has built trust and engagement, which are crucial to our success."

Our Pacific Office's role in maintaining daily operational oversight, and the cultural intelligence they bring to that management, has been a consistent factor in sustaining that environment.