It's not that hiring managers are using the words incorrectly. It's that their predictions about their own future behaviour are wrong. They think they'll have a

It's not that hiring managers are using the words incorrectly. It's that their predictions about their own future behaviour are wrong. They think they'll have a lot of applicants, and hope that they'll reduce their own workload by helping the lower-quality candidates self-select out of the process, or maybe getting HR to do it for them. In practice it doesn't work that way. There aren't that many applicants, and none of them are exactly what the requirements specify. So they have to do the work of really understanding a candidate's skill set and experience, and then sketch out the onboarding and training that would be required to get them up to speed. Which is fine, because there aren't clear-cut predictors for success at these sorts of jobs anyway.