This sounds suspicious. The idea behind hard pulls is that other potential lenders can see how much credit you're requesting at one time even if you haven't received the credit yet. For example, if you're requesting credit from 10 different banks at once, a bank would have no way of knowing how much credit they could extend you because they would have no way of knowing how much credit you already had (or would soon have) and thus your available credit to income ratio.

If it works, great, do it, and find other banks that do it and get as much credit as you can :) But, I'm guessing they'll say at some point "oh, I'm sorry but my boss says we have to do a hard pull-- is that ok?". It's also possible they want to pre-qualify you for an amount of credit with a soft pull and then do the hard pull once you formally apply