The rise of artificial intelligence and the overall effects of technology in our industry had me feeling nostalgic recently. Seemingly gone are the days of high-touch staffing when we could make personal connections.

Allow me to paint a picture for you. It’s the ‘90s. You’re sitting at your desk, tackling a job opening. A towering stack of résumés sits in front of you, each one meticulously highlighted and marked up. You’ve spent hours applying your skills-matching technique, color-coding everything just right while trying not to spill your latest cup of stale office coffee. You fire up your word processor — or if you’re lucky, your computer — and start tweaking each résumé, making sure the objective statement is spot on, the highlights are front and center, and every detail is perfectly aligned with the details you gathered from your in-person interview. And let’s not forget that cover letter you’ve had your candidate rewrite three times to perfection.

The company you’re working with hasn’t yet embraced email for résumés because, let’s be honest, dial-up internet is painfully slow. So, at the end of the day, you make your way to the fax machine, feeding in each résumé one by one. But if you’re like me — competitive and eager — all that took way too long. So instead of relying solely on carefully highlighted résumés, you hit the phones, calling each hiring manager one by one, selling your candidate and securing interviews. And guess what? It worked — 99.9% of the time, it was far more effective than sending faxes into the void! Hiring managers knew and trusted you to understand their culture, their specific hiring needs and their managerial style.

Fast forward to today, and it’s a much different world. With the advancement of technology, those once-common practices have all but disappeared. Vendor-neutral programs have taken over, and direct recruiter-to-hiring-manager access has been significantly reduced, if not eliminated.

Now, looking ahead, it seems like even the traditional résumé is on life support. Automated systems collect and analyze candidate data, highlighting it for hiring managers, effectively replacing the good old-fashioned manual highlighter.

These days, résumés are tailored to feed algorithms rather than be read by actual people. This seems like a natural passing, considering the cover letter has already gone the way of the dodo bird.

Still, for all its strengths, technology does have its blind spots. How do we validate that what someone says is true and accurate? Utilizing skills-based testing or technologies to validate hard skills seems logical, but is AI accurate when assessing personality-based roles or customer-facing positions? Do they consider culture or manager personalities? Have we narrowed the scope with technology so much that we are missing the best match? Sure, technology is impressive, but can advanced AI truly evaluate personalities and soft skills the way a seasoned recruiter can?

While technology and AI are certainly here to stay, the processes of old could still be of value. I believe it’s time to revisit some of our grassroots recruiting practices to move faster and, more importantly, more accurately. It’s time to consider the return of strong recruiter-to-hiring manager relationships as the war for talent heats up.

As the landscape continues to evolve, one thing is certain: Recruiting will always be about people, and maybe, just maybe, it’s time to bring a little more of the human touch back into the process with the elimination of the résumé.