'Crying CEO' | Sincere or not, this teary LinkedIn post does nothing to help laid-off staff

There isn’t a corner of LinkedIn that hasn’t heard about Braden Wallake in recent days. His name, and his infamous crying selfie, have even travelled beyond LinkedIn’s echo chamber and found their way into global news outlets.

Wallake, the CEO of social media marketing agency Hyper Social, went viral last week for posting a photo of himself crying, alongside a post revealing that he had to lay off a number of staff after he scaled up his business too quickly.

“This will be the most vulnerable thing I'll ever share. I've gone back and forth [about] whether to post this or not,” the post began.

“We just had to lay off a few of our employees. I've seen a lot of layoffs over the last few weeks on LinkedIn. Most of those are due to the economy, or whatever other reason. Ours? My fault.”