Fundamentals of Human Resource Management 5th Edition by Raymond Noe, John Hollenbeck, Barry Gerhart, Patrick Wright

Exercise 21

IS SOCIALSCORE MIXING BUSINESS AND PLEASURE?
Until recently, Facebook was mainly a place to keep up with the personal lives of family and friends. But after LinkedIn began to build a network of people focused on career development, Facebook wanted in on the career networking, too. It found a way in with a website called BranchOut, which offers a job board and job-hunting database. BranchOut users link to their Facebook account, and BranchOut pulls their information on education and work history from Facebook to create a BranchOut career profile. BranchOut also collects the user's connections to his or her Facebook friends.
To get people more engaged with the site, BranchOut came up with a quiz game called SocialScore. The game displays pairs of randomly selected Face-book friends and asks the player to choose which of those friends he or she would rather work with. BranchOut keeps score, notifies the winners, and saves the data. It can then combine the scores with, say, job title to create rankings. For example, at least in theory, a recruiter could buy rankings of accountants or waitresses based on their ratings by their friends.
Some people see the SocialScore game as a kind of middle-school-style popularity contest, not at all professional. Others can envision that the results would be a useful way to identify prospective hires who get along well with others.
If a BranchOut user plays SocialScore, who is affected by the scores? Does it seem ethical to you that a recruiter could evaluate a candidate based on a score over which the candidate has no control? Why or why not?