Last job I hired for I required short video submission answering some basic questions. If you didn't submit a video you were automatically disqualified. The previous position we hired for had over 1,000 applicants this last position around 500.
This makes total sense to me. Limiting the usage to their tooling means they can place reasonable limits on usage by controlling how the client interacts with the LLM and making those calls as efficient as possible. The current state of things didn't really feel sustainable.