We investigate hermitian Yang-Mills connections on pullback bundles with respect to adiabatic classes on the total space of holomorphic submersions with connected fibres. Under some technical assumptions on the graded object of a Jordan-Holder filtration, we obtain a necessary and sufficient criterion for when the pullback of a strictly semistable vector bundle will carry an hermitian Yang-Mills connection, in terms of intersection numbers on the base of the submersion. Together with the classical Donaldson-Uhlenbeck-Yau correspondence, we deduce that the pullback of a stable (resp. unstable) bundle remains stable (resp. unstable) for adiabatic classes, and settle the semi-stable case.