New evaluation
AI disclosure · written down

Yes, there is AI in it. Here is exactly where.

Matatah’s agent helps people apply for jobs. It uses a language model to do that. Rather than leave employers guessing and candidates dreading the question, we say what the agent does, what it will never do, and how to answer “did you use AI?” — and we sign a receipt for every application so the answer can be checked instead of believed.

What the agent does — and does not do

Both lists are statements about the code, not aspirations. The checks named here run on every submission and their results are pinned in the receipt.

It does

  • Re-words your résumé for one posting — reorders, tightens and re-phrases what is already there so the parts that match the job are easiest to find.
  • Drafts a cover letter from your master letter, your profile and the posting.
  • Fills form fields with answers you wrote and banked, or with facts from your profile, and labels where each answer came from.
  • Checks its own work before send: every number, year and named employer in the tailored version is looked up in your base résumé (checkClaims), and the document is scanned for hidden text or instructions aimed at a screener (scanDocument).
  • Stops and asks you at the pre-send gate — the diff of exactly what will be sent — unless you have turned that gate off.

It never does

  • Never invents a fact. No new employer, title, degree, year, metric or skill. If it is not in your résumé or your profile, it does not go on the application. The claims check exists to catch the agent if it ever slips, and the result is on the receipt.
  • Never uses anyone else’s content. Not other users’ résumés, not a library of “good answers”, not the posting’s wish-list pasted back as your experience.
  • Never hides text. No white-on-white keywords, no zero-width characters, no “ignore previous instructions”. Every submitted document is scanned for exactly that and the receipt says whether it was clean.
  • Never impersonates you in an interview or a call. The agent applies; it does not talk to people.
  • Never claims you did not use AI. The receipt says AI-assisted whenever a tailored version was sent, and we tell you to say the same.

Only your own words go in

The agent’s raw material is your uploaded résumé, your profile, your master cover letter and the answers you have written and banked. The tailored résumé is a re-arrangement of that material for one posting. After drafting, every number, year and proper noun in the draft is looked up in your base résumé; anything not found is listed on the receipt as a new fact, in red, for the employer to see. A clean receipt says claims consistent with base résumé and means that check found nothing new.

Why not let it embellish a little? Because the person who has to defend the résumé in an interview is you, not the model. A claim you cannot back up in a live conversation is a liability, and an agent that adds one is working against you.

A human approves before anything is sent — by default

Every account has an approval gate: before the agent presses Submit it shows you the exact documents and every answer it is about to enter, and waits. The setting is require_review on your profile and it ships on (DEFAULT TRUE). You can turn it off for hands-free runs; if you do, the receipt says auto-submitted after fill instead of candidate approved, so the employer can tell the difference and so can you.

1

Draft

Tailored résumé, cover letter and form answers are prepared from your material only.

2

Check

Claims are checked against your base résumé; the document is scanned for hidden text.

3

Gate

With the gate on, you see the diff and approve, edit or cancel. Nothing is sent until you do.

4

Receipt

On submit, a signed receipt records what was sent, whether you approved it, and what the checks found. It lives at /r/<id>.

How to answer “did you use AI?”

The truthful answer, and the one we tell you to give
“Yes. I used an AI-assisted tool to tailor my own résumé to your posting, I approved what it sent, and I can show you the receipt.”

If you left the approval gate on, that sentence is exactly what the receipt says: AI-assisted, human-approved. If you turned it off, say so — the receipt reads AI-assisted, auto-submitted, and the honest version of the sentence is “I set it to send on my behalf.”

If you applied with your uploaded résumé and no tailoring, the receipt says so too: candidate’s own résumé, unmodified. Do not claim more manual work than you did, and do not claim less.

Never say “no”. It is untrue, it is checkable, and it turns a tool everyone uses into a character question about you.

What a receipt proves

A receipt is a statement by the tool, about the tool, signed with an HMAC only Matatah holds. An employer can open it without an account. It proves:

Which résumé went outA hash of the tailored version and of the base it came from. Change one character and the hash changes.
Whether facts were addedThe claims check result: consistent, or the exact numbers and years that appear only in the tailored version.
Whether anything was hiddenThe hidden-text scan result, with the offending text quoted if any was found.
Whether a person approved itApproved at the gate, reviewed before submit, or auto-submitted — and from which device.
What the form was toldWhich fields were filled and where each answer came from (profile, banked answer, drafted, typed). The answers themselves stay private.
The disclosure sentence itselfFrom receipt v3, the line an employer reads — AI-assisted, human-approved — is inside the signed body, so it cannot drift from the facts under it.

What we do not claim

  • A receipt is not proof the candidate is good. It is proof of what the tool did. Fit is your call.
  • We do not detect AI use elsewhere. A receipt covers one application sent through Matatah. It says nothing about a résumé written with another tool, or by a friend, or by hand — and we do not run “AI detectors” on anyone; they accuse non-native speakers and career changers falsely.
  • The model can be wrong in ways the checks miss. The claims check looks for numbers, years and named entities not in the base. A softened verb or a stronger adjective passes it. That is why the gate is on by default: the person reads it before it goes.
  • A signature proves origin, not truth. It proves the receipt was issued by Matatah and has not been altered. It does not prove the base résumé is accurate — only the candidate can.
  • We store the answers, not the employer. The public receipt shows field labels and sources. The values are the candidate’s and are shown only to them.

This page describes the behaviour of Matatah’s apply agent as shipped. Receipts are verifiable at /r/<id>; the verification tools for postings, offers and recruiter messages are at /verify; how portals, employers and listings are stamped is at /trust.