Reviewing and Approving Matches

After a matching run completes, all recommendations enter the Shadow Approval Queue. Nothing happens automatically from here: no member is notified, no match goes active, until you take an action. This queue is your final check before pairing people, and it is designed to give you full visibility into why each match was recommended.

The Shadow Approval Queue

Navigate to Admin > Matches > Approval Queue to see all pending recommendations. The list shows:

• The two recommended partners
• A compatibility indicator (the AI's overall confidence in the pairing)
• A short excerpt of the AI's rationale
• Quick action buttons: Approve, Reject, Override

Recommendations from the most recent run are listed first. If you have run matching multiple times, you may see recommendations from earlier runs as well; these remain in the queue until you act on them.

Reviewing a Match Recommendation

Click on any recommendation to open the detail view. This is where the AI's full rationale is displayed, along with both member profiles side by side.

The rationale is a plain-language explanation of why the AI considered this a strong pairing. It references specific profile dimensions: for example, "Mentee listed product management career transition as their primary goal; mentor has 8 years of product management experience and has explicitly offered to mentor on career transitions."

Read the rationale alongside the profiles to form your own judgment. The AI's recommendation is a starting point, not a directive.

Approving a Match

If you are satisfied with the recommendation, click Approve. The following happens immediately:

1. The match status moves to ACTIVE.
2. Both members receive an introduction email with each other's profiles and a link to their shared match hub.
3. A partnership agreement is automatically created for the pair, based on the applicable template hierarchy.
4. The pair's session cadence begins.

Mentor capacity is checked at the moment of approval. If approving this match would put the mentor over their capacity limit, the system will block the approval and show you a capacity error. You can override this block if you have a specific reason to exceed the limit.

Rejecting a Match

If a recommendation is not a good fit, click Reject. The match is removed from the queue. Neither member is notified. The AI may suggest the same pairing again in a future run unless you have a reason to prevent it.

Rejection does not carry any information forward to the AI; if you want to permanently prevent a specific pairing, use the manual match exclusion feature available on each member's profile.

Overriding a Match (Swapping a Partner)

Sometimes an AI recommendation is close but not quite right: one of the two people is a good candidate, but you would rather pair them with someone else. The Override action lets you swap one partner without starting over.

To override:

1. Open the match recommendation.
2. Click Override.
3. Search for the replacement partner by name or email.
4. Confirm the new pairing.

The overridden match is saved as a pending match with your manually selected partner. It appears in the queue as an admin-created match and goes through the same approval step.

Bulk Approve

If you have reviewed multiple recommendations and are satisfied with them, use Bulk Approve to activate several matches at once. Select the checkboxes next to each recommendation you want to approve, then click Approve Selected.

Bulk approval runs the same capacity checks as individual approval. Any match that fails a capacity check is skipped and flagged with an error; the rest are approved normally.

Bulk approval is most useful near the start of a program cohort when you are activating a large batch of new pairings at once.

Creating a Manual Match

The AI is not the only path to a match. If you want to pair two specific members directly, without running the AI engine, use manual match creation.

Navigate to Admin > Matches > New Match and search for the two members you want to pair. The system checks that both members are enrolled in a compatible program and that the proposed mentor has available capacity. If both checks pass, you can create the match directly.

Manual matches bypass the approval queue and are activated immediately. Both members receive an introduction email as they would for an approved AI match.

What Happens After Approval

Once a match is ACTIVE, it appears on the main Matches page. You can track it using the engagement score, view the activity timeline, and intervene if needed. For more on what happens next, see the Understanding Engagement Scores article.