This is about job ads, not their internal designation. I don't put out 8 different job ads when 2 are sufficient.

Posting a job ad isn't the onerous part of the process though to be fair.

It does make me wonder what would happen if you put out 100 different job adverts split apart by £1,000 increments. I'm sorry you aren't suitable for the 100k job you applied for but would you consider our 97k role instead?

It makes sense for multiple job ads if there are completely different roles applied by completely different people. But, for the sake of hiring, it doesn't make sense to invent new titles just to justify differently negotiated salaries. For example, I was once hired as a "Senior Software Developer" who essentially got paid twice what the least senior Senior got; they were to some extent mislabelled: They were senior in another capacity than software, and had transitioned inside the company but kept their titel because people are vain. Our responsibilities were vastly different: He was a frontend tokenmaxxer, and I migrated strategic customers to on-prem Kubernetes by negotiating contracts, bootstrapping clusters, and adapting applications to run without autoscaling. They could have given either of us a different title, but for the sake of the value we added, the salary made sense.

A title like "Senior Software Developer" can range from 5 years of general-purpose web development experience to 20 years of highly specialized experience. Those "Principal" and "Staff" titles don't necessarily make sense outside of larger corporations.

Most recently I've seen salary ranges up to 30% of the upper bound. Completely reasonable.

The point is you should be putting out different job postings when you are looking for different personas.

I'm not answering a pitch that says "$100K-$350K salary, final decision based on vibes" but I will if it says "$250K-$270K salary, needs 10 years of experience leading X kinds of projects and proficiency in Y, Z".

This is an ideal state, for sure, but it's also where corporate bureaucracy gets in the way. It's FAR easier to have a catch-all, pretty generic posting for a category of role than to get approval for discrete postings for each conceivable instantiation of that role category within a hiring org. This is also why many [tech] companies will include leveling information in the posting in addition to a salary range, so candidates will know that they could be considered whether they slot in as, for example, an IC4 or IC5.

Maybe you should, one for each expected level, with a description of the expected qualifications of each and how much you’ll pay for those qualifications? Sort of an “if X, then Y, but if also Z, then W” thing? Like a company should?