Duplicates are not noise — they are routes

What is a vendor blast?

An end client hands a requirement to a prime vendor. The prime distributes it to tier-two vendors, who distribute it further. By the time it reaches a bench-sales desk, the same role has arrived a dozen times, each copy differing in rate, wording, and how many layers sit between you and the client.

Those copies are not redundant data. They are twelve different commercial paths, each with its own margin and its own probability of getting a résumé in front of the decision maker.

What does deleting duplicates cost you?

Two things, both expensive. First, you lose price discovery: the spread between the best and worst rate on the same role is routinely 15–20%, and you cannot negotiate a spread you have deleted.

Second, you lose optionality. If your chosen vendor goes quiet, the alternative route is gone from your system — so the desk starts over on a role it already qualified for.

How does a canonical requirement plus routes work?

One canonical job holds the role: skills, work authorization, location, end client, and the shortlist. Every inbound copy becomes a route attached to that job, carrying its own vendor, rate, tax term, and layer count.

The desk works one role and picks a route at submission time. Nothing is chased twice, and nothing is thrown away.

• The shortlist is built once, against the canonical requirement.
• Rate comparison is a column, not an inbox search.
• Right-to-represent is enforced per route, so no candidate goes out twice on the same role.
• If a route stalls, the next-best one is already qualified.

How does the system know two postings are the same role?

Exact-text matching fails immediately — vendors rewrite titles, trim skills, and shift rates. Iris embeds each parsed requirement and compares it in vector space against open canonical jobs, then confirms the match on the structured fields that cannot drift: end client, location, work-authorization requirement, and duration.

A high-confidence match attaches as a route. Anything ambiguous is surfaced for a human rather than merged silently, because a wrong merge hides a real role.

What changes on the desk?

The visible change is volume: a morning inbox of ninety postings becomes a dozen real roles. The commercial change is that every one of those roles now carries its own price ladder, and the recruiter chooses where on the ladder to submit.