[version_five]

I didn't see an ethical problem with it. What prompted my comment below was that it was touted as a personalized service in the article when really it felt less personal than regular recruiting (and as you point out, there was a more thoughtful process of finding people in the first place, but then they got the fake videos + automated task to do).

It's equivalent in my mind to sending a form email that begins "Hello, $name". It's personalized in a technical sense but it's not personal. But not unethical either. On the ethics front I'd be more concerned about asking potential candidates to do some task - critique the website or whatever it was, without having any real skin in the game on the side of the hiring company. I don't agree with this kind of one-sided screening.