I do always find it odd when a not-megacorp company has dozens of open positions for various departments. Surely they can’t actually be hiring for these jobs simultaneously, and it’s just a hiring strategy to attract talent that might otherwise not be aware the company exists?
e.g. if your hiring manager says "If we could get someone on our team to cover either some of the devops or some of the backend dev, our one 5-year-tenured person on the team who is doing both could focus on the other." Now you've posted two roles for one opening; devops engineer and server software developer.
As a candidate I have the opposite experience with companies that advertise a long list of roles, like Flexport's "200 open roles".
If I see a company with a large number of slightly different roles, for example each specialising in one of the company's numerous obscure products, or some slightly diferent aspect of the process, I have no idea which one(s) to apply for and I end up skipping that company entirely, even if I like the company.
Red Hat is like this. Before the IBM acquisition I was interested in working there but I couldn't figure out what to do with the enormous list of product-specific ad activitiy-specific roles I could theoretically apply for. A recruiter was unable to help; they just wanted to know which ones interested me. Well, about 50 of the roles look interesting and suitable, but... so I didn't apply.
While different places do things differently - the role you apply for isn’t necessarily the role you are hired into.
Once upon a time, I was asked to do a tech interview for a candidate. I was told we’d already decided to hire him - the purpose of my interview was just to give management feedback on which of two different roles he’d be better suited for.
If you get overwhelmed by choice and prefer when companies are small enough that you don’t have to make choices like this, working for a big company probably isn’t for you anyway.
If you want a heuristic to overcome this decision paralysis, pick the first one that looks remotely interesting. Apply for it. Applying for something is better than applying for nothing, for obvious reasons.
But personally I have no real problem making choices or decisions, quickly if necessary. I understand the usefulness of making decisions when there's no particular reason to favour one or other.
It is more that the ocean of slight title variations, especially when there are lots of obscure products I've mostly never heard of or obscure departmental processes, make the roles (and the products I'd be working on) seem narrow, tedious and overly corporate. They make the jobs and the company feel offputting for me.
I also want more of my skills and knowledge to be useful and used, so roles that seem like they're designed to only do one thing in a narrow skilll area, perhaps to appeal to people who think they only have one skill area, are offputting. (Note to ad writers: Long lists of tech skills and products does not help with this. Showing variety of things the employee could work on if they want to does.)
Feelings and impressions are part of my heuristic for deciding which companies I find interesting enough to invest my time and energy in.
I don't agree that applying for something is better than nothing. It certainly isn't obviously better.
Some people take the "apply to hundreds of roles" approach to job applications. I'm the opposite (so far; it could happen).
I'm very selective, and apply research and intuition before proceeding with any potential role or equivalent. Impressions from job ads or other materials, including the company's website and reputation, how they present, what they make, who their customers are, and their attitude towards open source, IP and personal side projects, are an important part of that.
That's feedback I'd like to give to any would-be employers and hiring ad writers who are thinking they need to list hundreds of variations of roles to attract candidates, perhaps thinking candidates are combing through for narrow matches. It's going to put off some candidates.
(In the last 20 years I've also found the best jobs have been ones where I didn't end up sending a CV or résumé, but a recruiter hooked me up with a company without one, or by knowing a person who is in a position to hire. Due to that I now see "if interested send your CV/résumé", or an online application form, as a red flag suggesting a worse job, though I wouldn't assume that it is; it's just a signal. But that's another story.)
I gave up after 4 of them. A month later, I've heard nothing back on any of those.
That fine specimen of humanity goes on to say, in the same breath “we are fine, we have money” so clearly they were not pushing bankruptcy, and would have been in a position to help out those they screwed over so brutally.
I’m making it my mission to figure out the combined business interests of their board and c-suite, and make sure that I’ll not use those products if at all possible.
Like firing someone
So I think that's a great policy, if you have enough money to cover the periods when good staff are cheap and available, and your vacancy list is short. You don't have to fire the dross, because you don't ever hire dross.
How is this at all different from how literally every hiring manager in the world thinks of themselves? Literally no one is going to wake up in the morning and think "wow, I'm OK with whiffing on a candidate for my team."
If you need a database developer and some junior person who has a couple of indistinguished but relevant jobs on their resume shows up, do you take them over the person who has no database development at all but a decade of lisp with some very high powered firms?
Some firms will choose the latter because they believe highly talented people can adapt. Some don’t.
For some companies the job is "maintain the team at X people, so when we're below that hire the best people we can find in a reasonable time, and when we're above that we close hiring".
It's a way to get around salary disclosure laws, as well.