I don't think I can get hired without a referral - haven't managed to land a cold interview once so far. So at least, there's no evidence of it.
Interviews are a performance act, they are the packaging that you throw away after buying a product for the cover.
The interview "suit" I wear is actually one of someone who's calm and smiling - instead of stimming with my hair and dead-pan with a smirk (if I was a woman, I'd have resting b-tch face).
I feel for this guy, because I figure out how to wear that suit, but I still need to thumb the scales to get hired, because the mask I'm wearing is effort & it does show to the perceptive HR person (& it doesn't matter what you are faking - if you're faking it, it counts against you).
However, here's where everything is unfair in this world.
I have a pretty decent job because I ran into the right people at the right conference back in 2004, where someone noticed that I might be able to do hard things with minimal effort (and fail at easy things, simultaneously).
There must be thousands of people in my state who never got that "come to Yahoo, have a coffee" invitation & get plugged into a network of people who have kept me gainfully employed for more than a decade.
I definitely had fewer challenges there because I wasn't an outright minority in the industry - I didn't have anything to prove beyond the performance.