Description

What happens when the people who built the broken system decide to fix it?

In this episode, Clarence sits down with career strategist, fractional HR consultant, and Emppowered co-founder Caty Toro for a candid, unflinching look at what's actually broken in today's hiring process and what it's going to take to build something better.

Caty was a guest in Season 1, where she and Clarence had a two-part conversation about career change that resonated deeply with listeners. A lot has changed since then. They've become business partners. They've built a platform. And they've had to reckon, honestly, with a truth that changed everything: they were both part of the system they now spend their time trying to dismantle.

This episode doesn't offer surface-level advice. It goes straight to the root—the broken incentives, the misplaced blame, the fiction-matching exercise that passes for hiring in most organizations today, and the harder question of what it actually means to stop optimizing for the wrong system and start building a better one.

In this episode, Clarence and Caty unpack:

1. Why AI didn't break the hiring system—it just revealed the cracks that were already there
2. The blame loop between job seekers and recruiters, why both sides are right, and why both sides are wrong
3. The difference between being qualified for a role and being aligned with it—and why that distinction changes everything
4. Why most job descriptions are fiction, and what that means for every step of the process downstream
5. The empathy deficit at the center of the hiring experience—and why it's the one thing AI will never be able to replicate
6. What it's actually been like to try to catalyze systemic change in a landscape this complex, this entrenched, and this resistant to it
7. Why "comfortable hell" keeps so many people—and organizations—from ever starting something different

The honest admission at the heart of this conversation:

Clarence and Caty have both been on the hiring side of the table. They've ghosted candidates. They've passed on résumés without a conversation. They've run the process the way the system incentivized them to run it. And at some point, they recognized they were feeding people through a cycle rather than getting them out of it. That recognition became Emppowered.

• Connect with Caty Toro
• Connect with Clarence Bongalos
• Learn more about Emppowered
• Find Out What Misaligned Hiring is Costing You
• Take the Alignment Assessment

Keywords

#hiring #hiringprocess #alignment #misalignment #jobsearch #jobseekers #recruiters #hiringleaders #futureofwork #brokensystems #employeeengagement #jobboard