The repair of the MAT locus after cutting by the HO endonuclease almost always results in a mating type switch. When an a cell cuts the MATa allele present at the MAT locus, the cut at MAT will almost always be repaired by copying the information present at HML. This results in MAT being repaired to the MATα allele, switching the mating type of the cell from a to α. Similarly, an α cell which has its MATα allele cut by the HO endonuclease will almost always repair the damage using the information present at HMR, copying the MATa gene to the MAT locus and switching the mating type of α cell to a.
This is the result of the action of a recombination enhancer (RE)  located on the left arm of chromosome III. Deletion of this region causes a cells to incorrectly repair using HMR. In a cells, Mcm1 binds to the RE and promotes recombination of the HML region. In α cells, the α2 factor binds at the RE and establishes a repressive domain over RE such that recombination is unlikely to occur. An innate bias means that the default behaviour is repair from HMR. The exact mechanisms of these interactions are still under investigation.