We still do those in addition to application. and sometime personal chat on our TS.
Written app has more benefits for a guild, you get valuable info how the person applying is able to complete given task (write proper app). Some other personal traits are given out like social background on given server, personal strong sites (and from that derived weak sites). If the person skips through all fields of template in quick one-word replyes he is not the one we look for.
We used to have those: Guild meeting every half of year(strong alcohol/THC tolerance required), IRL consulting/help benefit (we have a bunch of experts in our guild), Guild T-Shirts