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

Exercise 6

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 you were to play SocialScore with random pairs of people in your own Facebook network (or in other social networks you belong to), how well do you think your scores would represent these people's actual performance of a job? Would the scores be more fair or less fair to them than what you would say if a recruiter directly asked you to evaluate them as a possible employee? Is it ethical to ask people to play a game and then use the scores for hiring decisions? Why or why not?