Petko Petkov

Author of Immigrants’ Heart. I speak to the people responsible for keeping international talent.

Your international hires didn’t leave for more money. They left because they never felt at home.

The problem nobody puts in the exit interview

A senior hire relocates. The company pays for the move, the visa, the deposit, the school fees.Two years later they resign, and the exit interview says "a better opportunity."It usually wasn't.They had the salary. They had the apartment. They had the job title their parents repeated to everyone they knew. On paper, they'd arrived. They still felt like a guest in the city they lived in, and a stranger in the one they left.That's the Arrival Myth. The belief that getting there will finally make you feel at home. It won't. Not the next promotion. Not the next country. And not going back either, which is the part nobody warns you about.Harvard Business Review measured it back in 1999. A quarter of the people companies sent abroad quit within a year of coming home, double the rate of colleagues who never went. An industry survey a few years later put it closer to half inside two years.The bill isn't small either. Replacing a senior employee costs between half and two times their salary. And a 2024 KPMG estimate puts a failed international assignment somewhere between 850,000 and 1.25 million US dollars, once relocation, tax and lost productivity are counted.The people you relocate are the most expensive people you hire, and the quietest when they go.

What I speak about

Why Your Best International Hires LeaveBuilt for global mobility, talent and retention teams, and for anyone whose job includes keeping people who moved countries to take it.The talk covers three things:Why a relocation package solves logistics and never solves belonging.What actually decides whether someone is still there in year five.What a company can change about it that costs nothing.

Who I am

I left Bulgaria at 18 with a suitcase.I cleaned restaurants in Denmark before eight in the morning. Five years later I was part of the team delivering a construction project in Auckland worth 30 million New Zealand dollars. I built the life. Then I went home, eleven years after I'd left, and found that home didn't fix it either.Immigrants' Heart is the book about what finally did. It's the seven steps I worked out the slow way, across three countries and eleven years, and it exists because nobody handed me anything like it when I needed it.I'm not a researcher writing about this from the outside. I'm the employee who left.

Immigrants' HeartWhy Life Abroad Never Feels Like Home, and the 7 Steps to Finally BelongPublished November 2026.

BookingSpeaking enquiries go straight to me.

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