There's a lot about typical application processes that's just... kind of obnoxious. Making people manually correct the bad parsing your tracker does on uploading your resume? That's clunky and annoying, and a failure to respect your applicants' time. Making people beg for a job by writing up a 500 word essay about what excites you about them specifically, along with their opinions about puppies just so that you know it was personally crafted? (And yes, I've seen that specifically.) That's kind of demeaning, and a failure to respect your applicants' time.
But requiring that they create a discrete user account, for something they're effectively going to interact with once, that in all likelihood is using a recycled login and going to be forgotten in a week? That's on a completely separate level -- it's a failure to respect your applicants' security, by pointlessly adding to the risk that their user credentials are going to show up on Have I Been Pwned someday, and it's just irresponsible.