I recently had a client — a recruiter — who was upset because an HR generalist in his office was “meddling” in the recruiting process and had created some confusion between him and the hiring manager.

On the one hand, the fear of layoffs is central to many employees’ concerns. On the other hand, recruiters and hiring managers report that it is exceeding difficult to find the skilled information technologists, computer programmers, software engineers, health workers, and even senior managers and executives that they need.

Recruiting, like so many other services, is undergoing massive disruption. Everything is changing. The expectations of hiring managers, job seekers, candidates, and employees have shifted from passive to active and from acceptance to demand.

We all know that recruiting will not look like it does now in 10 years. But what will it be like? Which skills will be useful, and which ones will be obsolete?

Now almost 20 years into the new century, we are seeing the results of an era built on technology from mobile phones to machine learning. We have many wonderous and exciting tools, but we don’t always have the wisdom to use them well. I see 2019 as a year of adjustment and recalibration. We will continue to reap value from the tools but also create processes and guidelines for using them better and more effectively. Below are some of my thoughts and observations on what is unfolding. I’d welcome your comments.

All I see lately are recruitment conferences focused almost entirely on technology. It seems as if other things — the really important skills that differentiate the skilled recruiter from the amateur — are not important anymore.

For centuries people have been captivated by the idea of predicting the future (and I’ll be offering my own predictions on the stage in a few days). Crystal ball gazers and fortune tellers all promised to be able to do this. They played on our biases, weaknesses, and gullibility and counted on us attributing chance occurrences to their predictive powers.

It seems that 2016 was the year when recruiters fixated on improving candidate engagement and the candidate experience. There were hundreds of articles and reports on candidate engagement, awards, and at least one conference devoted entirely to discussing it. There is nothing wrong about wanting to make the experience a candidate has friendlier or in making it easier to apply for a job. I know all too well how frustrating it can be for a candidate to navigate the typical career site, learn about and apply for a suitable position, and then find out that all his or her work went into a black hole. Most career sites and recruiting processes are designed for administrative ease or for the recruiter and are not seamless or simple for a candidate.