Emppowered Launches to Redesign Workplace Systems for the Digital Age

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SAN DIEGO, CA — Emppowered, a workplace optimization company founded by Clarence Bongalos and co-founder Caty Toro, announces its official launch with a mission to fundamentally redesign the systems that shape how work is experienced. The company positions itself not as another workplace consultancy, but as architects of a systemic shift that balances power dynamics between employees and employers.

The launch comes at a critical moment when workplace systems built during the Industrial Revolution continue to govern a digital economy where 80% of U.S. jobs are service-based. According to McKinsey research, artificial intelligence has the potential to be as transformative as the steam engine was to the 19th-century Industrial Revolution, yet organizations continue operating on century-old frameworks designed for efficiency rather than effectiveness.

"We recognized that coaching and consultancies in the world of work only help people optimize for and work around existing systems," says Bongalos, founder of Emppowered. "The systems in play were created in the Industrial Revolution, a completely different time than the one we live in now. To scale our solution to the problem, it wasn't about continuing to coach people on how to optimize. It was about creating new systems that will change the way we do it altogether."

The Problem with Optimization

Both Bongalos and Toro operated independent consultancies serving employees and employers before founding Emppowered. Through their combined three years of experience in career coaching and strategic consulting founded on decades of executive and C-suite leadership, they observed a troubling pattern: clients achieved results and reached their goals, but the cycle repeated itself. The underlying systems pulled people back to square one.

The resume exemplifies this systemic failure. Between 70-75% of resumes are screened out by Applicant Tracking Systems due to lack of relevant keywords, poor formatting, or fundamental misalignment with job descriptions. Nearly one-third of workers leave a job in the first 90 days because it wasn't what they expected. The backward-looking focus on past accomplishments rather than future potential creates a masking process that feeds turnover from the very beginning.

"The resume is backwards-looking and focuses on what we've accomplished rather than what we have the potential to do," Bongalos explains. "It fails to take into account the reasons why we were able to accomplish those things and assumes that we'll be able to replicate that success in a different environment with different factors. Additionally, optimizing the resume to speak to the ATS by stuffing it with keywords begins the masking process that feeds turnover."

Beyond LinkedIn's Limitations

Emppowered's flagship platform serves people at critical touchpoints in the workplace journey, from social networking to hiring to employee engagement and learning and development. The company describes its vision as "what LinkedIn wanted to be but failed to become."

While LinkedIn has built a significant user base, younger generations increasingly express disdain for the platform's culture of performative content and surface-level connections. Users describe it as encouraging people to "speak corporate" rather than fostering authentic professional relationships. The platform perpetuates keyword matching as the foundation for finding jobs, while Emppowered's approach is based on richer data points that signal potential for alignment.

"Our platform is based on much richer data points that signal potential for alignment, which is critical in an employee-employer relationship that is sustainable and mutually beneficial," says Toro.

Redefining Alignment

Emppowered's core philosophy centers on alignment as a mutual, two-sided relationship rather than a one-directional fit. Traditional definitions of alignment focus on how employees fit into organizations through culture fit and skills match. Emppowered expands this definition to include core values, shared vision, mutuality, trust, commitment, and safety.

The business case for this approach is compelling. Poor culture fit costs organizations between 50-60% of an employee's annual salary due to turnover, according to Harvard Business Review research. Culture misalignment remains one of the top reasons for employee turnover, alongside engagement issues and work-life balance concerns.

"Today's workforce demands a more two-sided, equal relationship," Bongalos notes. "If the job or company barely pays a livable wage, there's no alignment at the foundation. If an employee is a visionary or strategic thinker but not an executor, but the company fails to recognize that strength and neglects to promote them into a role that they are equipped to do, there is no alignment."

Systems That Empower

Emppowered's focus on systems becomes its value proposition. The company recognizes that not all organizations can afford to pay people what they want, but argues that companies can offer a business philosophy that empowers people to gain the skills they need to continue to grow both within or beyond the organization.

"Our platform is about creating systems that empower people to achieve what they want," says Toro. "This means that even if companies can't meet the demand when it comes to pay, they can offer training and learning and development. This is where our platform will offer solutions that will fill the gaps."

The company's mission extends beyond building better tools. Bongalos and Toro envision a fundamental transformation of workplace culture rooted in empowerment rather than the rigid processes, protocols, and policies that emerged from the Industrial Revolution's factory model.

"The Industrial Revolution created a factory-like world that discouraged creativity and required us to follow rigid processes to optimize for assembly lines, performance, and production," Bongalos explains. "It discouraged and disempowered what makes us human: creativity, emotion. Our mission is about bringing empowerment back into the workplace and really making it the roots of the new trees we wish to grow."

A Call to Transformation

Emppowered seeks early adopters on both sides of the workplace equation. On the employee side, the company targets people who have experienced the pain of the current job market: those unemployed for extended periods, who have adjusted their resumes dozens of times, submitted hundreds of applications, or gone through multiple interview rounds only to be ghosted or rejected.

On the employer side, Emppowered seeks business leaders, HR professionals, and recruiters tired of costly hiring mistakes, battling with quantity over quality of candidates, and struggling with employee engagement while seeing increases in turnover and declines in culture.

"There's a common saying that whatever you're not changing, you're choosing," Bongalos concludes. "When are we going to stop choosing to just optimize for the same systems even though we know they're broken and instead choose to fix it, make it better, and just do things differently?"

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About Emppowered

Emppowered is a workplace optimization company founded by Clarence Bongalos and Caty Toro. The company's mission is to create a future where work is designed to serve people and organizations equally by redesigning the systems that shape how work is experienced. Through its flagship platform and comprehensive approach to workplace transformation, Emppowered aims to foster balanced power dynamics that drive innovation, retention, and sustainable growth.

Media Contact

Clarence Bongalos Founder and CEO, Emppowered San Diego, CA Email: press@emppowered.com Website: www.emppowered.com