I was essentially unable to reply for anything other than "Software Engineer Intern". They took my resume, and a cover letter (which I am fairly sure was never read.) I then had two telephone interviews, after which I received an email asking me to choose two interests from a list of about two dozen (which was not an easy task!). From there, I was placed in a "pool" of possible candidates, and I believe that teams from within Google would browse through the pool and find a candidate they liked. Myself, I was in the pool for two and a half months, and had pretty much given up on getting anything when I suddenly heard back that I had a place.
So, it might be different for "real" jobs with them, but in the case of my internship they did exactly a skill-set matching (in a way), and there was no "job cart".