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CEO dragged for posting crying selfie on LinkedIn after laying off employees (PHOTO)

Isabelle Docto
Isabelle Docto
|
Aug 11 2022, 6:08 pm
CEO dragged for posting crying selfie on LinkedIn after laying off employees (PHOTO)
Braden Wallake/LinkedIn

A CEO posted a selfie of himself crying on LinkedIn after laying off employees, but he’s getting no sympathy from the internet.

Braden Wallake, the chief executive officer of marketing and sales agency HyperSocial, posted a message on LinkedIn on Wednesday expressing regret for having to lay off some of his employees.

“This will be the most vulnerable thing I’ll ever share,” wrote Wallake, who’s based in Columbus, Ohio. “We just had to lay off a few of our employees.”

He goes on to say that while many of the layoffs from major tech companies in the last few weeks are “due to the economy, or whatever other reason,” this decision was all his fault.

“Days like today, I wish I was a business owner that was only money driven and didn’t care about who he hurt along the way. But I’m not,” Wallake wrote. “So, I just want people to see, that not every CEO out there is cold-hearted and doesn’t care when he/she have to lay people off.”

He adds that you usually don’t see CEOs of smaller companies talking about having to lay off one or two people compared to the thousands at bigger companies.

“[One] or [two] or [three] that would still be here if better decisions had been made,” said Wallake. “I’ve always hired people based on who they are as people. People with great hearts, and great souls. And I can’t think of a lower moment than this.”

At the end of the message is a teary-eyed photo of the CEO.

The post has gone viral, with over 33,000 likes on LinkedIn and over 6,000 comments.

Reaction online has been far from sympathetic to the CEO’s guilt.

One LinkedIn user who was also recently laid off dragged Wallake in the comments.

“I was just laid off — along with many others. If my CEO sent this I’d probably lose my mind. You’re crying? I’m crying. We’re crying. You still have your job. Imagine if we all posted pictures of US crying? We’d never get hired, because we are forced to be RESILIENT in our industries,” reads the comment. “Put those tears in a jar and make a potion to help the people’s lives you laid off better.”

In the past few weeks, a handful of tech companies in Canada have laid off employees, so this post may be salt in the wound for many who are in the former HyperSocial workers’ shoes.

Many questioned why he didn’t take a pay cut to offset costs.

“Instead of laying off two employees, you yourself could have taken a pay cut, and avoided it altogether,” reads a comment.

One LinkedIn user even exposed Wallake for adopting a sea lion.

Others say that the post is “self-serving” and is “literally everything wrong with business culture and LinkedIn bros combined.”

But there were also people that came to Wallake’s defence.

“Rather than backseat-coaching someone whose role you’ve never been in…it would be an amazing thing if we as humans could assume positive intentions of one another,” commented a LinkedIn user.

In fact, one of the employees who was laid off posted his own message to LinkedIn.

“Right now I’m ‘The guy who was let go by the crying CEO on LinkedIn,'” wrote Noah Smith.

He explained how he was “tearfully” told that the company didn’t have the funds to continue employing him and that he didn’t feel any “immediate rush of anger or resentment.”

He also condemned people mocking Wallake’s vulnerable post.

Isabelle DoctoIsabelle Docto
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