How does a vendor blast happen?
An end client gives a requirement to a prime vendor. The prime distributes it to tier-two vendors to widen the candidate net. Those vendors distribute further. Each hop rewrites the title, trims or expands the skills list, and adjusts the rate to preserve a margin.
By the time it reaches a bench-sales desk, one role has arrived a dozen times, and no two copies look identical.
Are the duplicates just noise?
No — that is the expensive mistake. Each copy is a distinct commercial route to the same end client, with its own rate, its own layer count, and its own probability of reaching the decision maker. Deleting eleven of twelve destroys price discovery and optionality at once.
The spread between the best and worst rate on the same role is routinely 15–20%. You cannot negotiate a spread you have deleted.
How do you deduplicate a blast without losing routes?
Collapse the copies into one canonical requirement holding the role — skills, work authorization, location, end client — and attach every inbound copy to it as a route carrying its own vendor, rate, tax term, and layer count.
Matching cannot be exact-text, because the wording drifts. It has to compare meaning and then confirm on the structured fields that do not drift: end client, location, work-authorization requirement, and duration.
How do you spot a blast?
Common signals: an unusually generic title, a rate stated as a range rather than a number, an end client named only by industry, and arrival from several unrelated senders within a short window. The last one is the strongest.
Related on this site
More terms
- W2 vs C2C vs 1099 — W2, C2C, and 1099 are the three tax terms for US contract work: employee of the agency, company-to-company billing, and independent contractor paid as an individual.
- Submittal-to-interview ratio — The submittal-to-interview ratio is the share of candidate submissions that convert to a client interview — a quality signal for matching and packaging, not a measure of desk output.