The MALA Assessment
MALA (Multidimensional Affective Language Analysis) is JobMatch’s personality profiling engine. It reads how you write — not what you write — to build a psychological profile used for matching.
What it measures
Section titled “What it measures”MALA produces a profile across five dimensions (the Big Five):
| Trait | What it reflects |
|---|---|
| Openness | Curiosity, creativity, comfort with ambiguity |
| Conscientiousness | Organization, reliability, follow-through |
| Extraversion | Energy from people vs. independent work |
| Agreeableness | Collaboration style, conflict approach |
| Neuroticism | Emotional stability under pressure |
These are traits — not judgments. There is no “good” or “bad” profile. A high-neuroticism score doesn’t mean you’re a bad hire; it means certain roles and cultures will fit you better than others.
How the assessment works
Section titled “How the assessment works”The assessment is a series of open-ended prompts. You write a few sentences in response to each one. There are no right answers.
MALA analyses your responses using:
- Sentiment & emotion layers — valence, arousal, specific emotions
- Linguistic patterns — vocabulary richness, sentence structure, coherence
- Word category analysis — based on established psychological dictionaries
- LLM synthesis — a final layer that checks for social desirability bias and validates convergence
Your profile updates incrementally as you answer more questions. You can pause and resume at any time.
Your archetype
Section titled “Your archetype”Based on your Big Five profile, MALA assigns you one of nine archetypes (e.g. “Analytical Strategist”, “Empathic Builder”). Your archetype:
- Appears on your profile card visible to recruiters
- Is used to match you with team cultures and roles
- Comes with a plain-language explanation of your strengths and what to watch for
Privacy
Section titled “Privacy”Your raw responses are never shared with companies. Recruiters see:
- Your archetype label
- Your Big Five trait scores (aggregated, not individual answers)
- A match explanation generated from your profile vs. their job config
You can withdraw your assessment data at any time from Settings → Privacy.