Paying for the interview is compelling. Almost nobody does that, so it's a differentiator. My first assumption on hearing that is "it sounds like they respect their engineers as professionals more than most companies do".
We often hire people with jobs. At most, it's three work days needed. If that's a problem, we can do the proctored skills test on a Saturday and we can cut the on-site down to 1 day. That's then one business day needed.
Most devs with existing jobs have good jobs with decent vacation/PTO policies. So they have days to invest if they want to.
Paying for the interview is compelling. Almost nobody does that, so it's a differentiator. My first assumption on hearing that is "it sounds like they respect their engineers as professionals more than most companies do".