Look, layoffs are tough no matter when they occur. The timing was terrible, but your article sounds like you were a disgruntled CB employee. Hey, I’m liberal when it comes to politics, but CB is a company like any other that has financial goals… it’s not a charity.

And to say things like “couldn’t a Super Bowl ad spot get scrapped in favor of letting these people keep their dignity” shows you have very little knowledge of how Internet recruiting sites even work, or business in general. You need traffic on your site in order to generate ROI for companies that pay you money for any of your services. Superbowl ads are expensive, but they create massive awareness. No traffic = no return = no renewal = no revenue = no company = no jobs.

I was actually one of the people who lost their jobs last week at CareerBuilder. I can’t imagine someone less responsible for any of what happened with the job losses at CB than Anthony Balderrama.

I was a writer at CB, too, so please allow me to shed some light on the publication schedule. Articles are written for the CareerBuilder main website, and then they MAY be picked up by other sites (CB has agreements to provide content on several other sites).

With CNN, they’re offered a selection of the CareerBuilder articles. The scheduling and publication dates are up to CNN, NOT CareerBuilder.

On December 1, right before I was left go, CNN ran an article that I wrote on companies that hire people to work from home. I was assigned that article in AUGUST and it originally appeared on our site in SEPTEMBER.

In general, for a given “month”, we were writing eight weeks prior to that time. This article was, without a doubt, written, finalized and published on the CareerBuilder site well before the CB layoffs materialized.

As a writer and journalist, Vanessa, I have to ask: Did you attempt to reach Mr. Balderrama or anyone at CareerBuilder about the timing of this article? If so, where is the company’s or Mr. Balderrama’s comments?

I agree the timing of the article is very unfortunate. And it’s been anything but easy to lose a job that I enjoyed so much and was so invested in. But I believe your post is based completely on erroneous assumptions, and I would suggest you revisit your post, and any reporting you did prior to posting it.

Thanks.

I know its easy for you, and popular, to jump on the bandwagon of negative comments from the former employees and bash Careerbuilder for the timing of the layoffs, but please try to bring some objectivity to your writing.

I became a fan of this site when Joel was doing the writing, but your hack jobs (on all companies who have any negative news to report, or sites you just don’t like the look of) are really getting old.

That article may have been published today, but it was probably written before he knew he would be losing friends and colleagues just like everyone else at that company. Layoffs are no more fun for the people who “make it”…not to say what CareerBuilder did was right (I – and I’d bet you – have too little business sense to say it was completely wrong either) but I’m sure Anthony and the rest of the employees there aren’t happy about these layoffs anymore than their former colleagues. That’s more than I can say for the smug, self-righteous bloggers of the world, whose own delight in all of this is completely transparent.