Every term
- Bench sales — Bench sales is the practice of marketing an IT staffing agency’s already-hired but currently unassigned consultants — its bench — to vendors and end clients to get them billing again.
- C2C (corp-to-corp) — C2C, or corp-to-corp, is a contract engagement where one incorporated business bills another for a consultant’s services, rather than the consultant being paid as an individual employee.
- Time-to-redeploy — Time-to-redeploy is the number of days between a consultant rolling off one assignment and confirming a start date on the next — the direct measure of idle bench cost.
- Right-to-represent — A right-to-represent (RTR) is a consultant’s written permission for one specific vendor to submit them to one specific requirement, preventing duplicate submissions through competing chains.
- Vendor blast — A vendor blast is the mass distribution of one job requirement across many vendors, so the same role reaches a staffing desk repeatedly in slightly different wording.
- 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.
- Prime vendor — A prime vendor holds the direct contract with the end client and distributes that client’s requirements to subcontracting vendors, sitting one layer from the hiring decision.
- Implementation partner — An implementation partner delivers a project, platform, or product rollout for an end client and staffs it from its own people plus subcontracted consultants.
- Hotlist — A hotlist is the list of consultants a staffing agency currently has available, with skills, rate, location, and work authorization, circulated to vendors to generate requirements.
Why this glossary exists
Two reasons. The first is practical: an owner evaluating automation, a new recruiter on a bench desk, and a client-side hiring manager are all reading the same requirement and understanding different things by “C2C” or “RTR”. Shared vocabulary removes a whole class of expensive misunderstanding.
The second is that these definitions are the raw material of the product. A requirement parser that does not model tax term, work authorization, layer count, and end client as structured fields cannot deduplicate a vendor blast or enforce a right-to-represent. The vocabulary is the data model — see how it works.
Where to go next
If you are here to work out whether any of this is worth automating, the bench ROI calculator puts a number on your own idle days. If you are comparing tools, the comparison pages say where we lose as well as where we win. If you want the long-form arguments, they are on the blog.