In every vendor demo and promise‑filled conference room, AI remains the miracle cure for everything that ails your hiring process. You know the “proof points” – cut time‑to‑hire in half, double the candidate quality, scale infinitely. And for a while, these promises of better hiring through better technology sounded great. Automation, after all, meant fewer scheduling emails and less endless updating of manual spreadsheets or candidate profiles. But what we actually automated wasn’t recruiting.