Yes it will! That pattern matching is based on prior experience and if the entire makeup of candidates changes that'll cause people to pattern match differently. If old prejudices are taking a while to die out, it won't be long until someone smart realizes there's whole groups of qualified candidates who aren't getting the same offers as others and hires them

> it won't be long until someone smart realizes there's whole groups of qualified candidates who aren't getting the same offers as others and hires them

There's an argument to be made that this is exactly what pipeline-level DEI programs are!

That's an efficient market theory, and it's extremely optimistic about how real people work.

If the goal is to prevent people from being biased, why not anonymize candidate packets? Zoom interviews can also be anonymized easily. If it's the case that equally strong, or stronger, candidates are being passed over anonymization should solve this.

Rather than working to anonymize candidates, every DEI policy I've witnessed sought to incentivize increasing the representation of specific demographics. Bonuses for hitting specific thresholds of X% one gender, Y% one race. Or even outright reserving headcount on the basis of race and gender. This is likely because the target levels of representation are considerably higher than the representation of the workforce. At Dropbox the target was 33% women in software developer roles. Hard to do when ~20% of software developers are women.

If you anonymize applications you don't hire the 'right' ratio.

Anonymization is probably an under tried idea. Various orchestras switched to blind auditions and significantly increased the number of women they hired.

people can cheat in anon interviews?

They can cheat non-anonymous interviews too. An alternative is to have candidates go in person to an office to interview, but the grading and hiring panel only sees anonymized recordings of the interview.