By "easy to work with" I mean qualities such as being amiable, outgoing, funny, or good-looking. Those are valuable traits, but pointing out who's the nicest guy in the room's not the problem here, and it's not even a difficult problem to solve. Everyone always knows who the popular people are.
Right, but the proposed solution wouldn't involve asking people which of their co-workers they like, it would be based on hopefully meaningful work-related interactions (emails). Obviously, the model breaks down if people give the thumbs up to forwarded joke emails or to mass "oh crap my review is coming up, can you give me a thumbs up" emails.
