Vendor Services - Sublity API

A vendor is a source of candidates, as the customer records it. A vendor service is one of the services that vendor offers — and it is what you name in X-Vendor-Service-Id on every call.

Why the two are separate

Because a vendor can offer a variety of services, and they do not all perform the same. A job board might sell a sponsored listing, a resume database subscription and an email blast; an agency might do contingent search, retained search and locums. Each is billed differently and each produces candidates of a different quality.

Attributing to the vendor would only ever tell a customer what the vendor as a whole cost and returned. Attributing to the service tells them which of that vendor's services is actually worth paying for — so they can renew the one that produces hires and drop the one that produces noise, instead of judging the relationship as a single number.

For plenty of vendors the distinction does not matter much: one source, one service, and the two are effectively the same row. It matters enormously for vendors with a wide range of services, which is exactly where a customer's spending decisions are hardest — and it costs nothing to model both the same way.

Why it is a header on every call

The vendor service does two jobs at once: it is what your permissions hang on, and it is what any candidate you submit is attributed to. One lookup answers both "may you" and "whose ROI does this count towards", and the two must never diverge.

A vendor service always belongs to exactly one customer. The same real-world recruiter working with three customers is three different vendor services, one in each account, with three different ids and three different sets of permissions.