A Glossary of Key Keap Platform & Feature Terminology for HR & Recruiting Professionals

In the fast-evolving landscape of HR and recruiting, leveraging robust CRM and automation platforms like Keap can dramatically enhance efficiency, candidate experience, and ultimately, your hiring success. Understanding the core terminology of Keap is not just about jargon; it’s about unlocking the strategic power of these tools to automate tedious tasks, personalize communication, and streamline your entire talent acquisition and management process. This glossary is designed to equip HR and recruiting professionals with a clear understanding of Keap’s essential features, enabling you to better leverage its capabilities for your firm’s growth and operational excellence.

Keap CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Keap CRM is the foundational system for managing all contact information, interactions, and activities related to candidates, clients, employees, and other stakeholders within your HR and recruiting ecosystem. For HR professionals, it acts as a centralized database for applicant tracking, onboarding new hires, managing employee records, and maintaining client relationships. In a recruiting context, it allows you to track candidate journey from initial contact to placement, ensuring no valuable interaction is lost. Efficient use of Keap CRM leads to a “single source of truth” for all people-related data, eliminating manual errors and enabling quick access to critical information for personalized communication and strategic decision-making.

Contact Record

A Contact Record in Keap is the individual profile created for every person in your database. This comprehensive record stores vital information such as name, contact details, communication history (emails, calls), associated tasks, custom field data (e.g., skill sets, preferred job roles, onboarding status), and any tags applied. For HR and recruiting, a well-maintained contact record is crucial. It ensures recruiters have immediate access to a candidate’s full history, interview notes, and application status, enabling highly personalized follow-ups. For HR, it centralizes employee data, training progress, and performance reviews, ensuring compliance and effective talent management.

Tags

Tags are customizable labels applied to contact records in Keap, serving as a powerful tool for segmentation and organization. They allow HR and recruiting professionals to categorize contacts based on specific attributes, behaviors, or stages in a process. Examples include “Applicant – Software Engineer,” “Hired – Onboarding Complete,” “Client – Tech Startup,” or “Interviewed – Reject.” Tags are fundamental for triggering automated campaigns, sending targeted communications, and filtering lists for reporting. Properly implemented tagging strategies ensure that the right messages reach the right audience at the right time, enhancing candidate experience and operational efficiency.

Campaigns

Keap Campaigns are automated workflows designed to nurture leads, manage candidate pipelines, onboard employees, or engage clients through a series of predefined steps. A campaign can include emails, text messages, tasks, internal notifications, and even applying or removing tags, all triggered by specific actions or conditions. For HR, a campaign might automate the entire onboarding process, sending welcome emails, training modules, and compliance forms. For recruiters, campaigns can automate candidate nurturing, interview scheduling, and post-placement follow-ups, ensuring consistent communication and reducing manual effort across high-volume processes.

Sequences

Within a Keap Campaign, a Sequence refers to a series of timed, automated actions designed to guide a contact through a specific journey. Unlike an entire campaign which can be complex, a sequence is a linear set of steps like sending emails, waiting a few days, then sending another email, or creating a task for a team member. In HR, a sequence could be used for a drip campaign for new hires, providing staggered access to resources. In recruiting, a sequence might be used to follow up with passive candidates over several weeks, delivering valuable content and prompting engagement, ensuring consistent outreach without constant manual intervention.

Broadcasts

Broadcasts in Keap are one-time communications sent to a specific segment of your contacts, typically via email or SMS. Unlike campaigns, which are automated and triggered, broadcasts are manually initiated to deliver timely updates, announcements, or general communications. For HR, broadcasts can be used to send company-wide announcements, policy updates, or benefits reminders to all employees. In recruiting, they are ideal for announcing new job openings to a pool of qualified candidates, inviting specific talent to virtual job fairs, or sending urgent updates about a hiring process, ensuring rapid and widespread dissemination of information.

Forms

Keap Forms are web-based forms used to collect information from contacts, ranging from simple contact details to detailed applications or feedback. These forms can be embedded on your website, landing pages, or shared directly via a link. For HR and recruiting, forms are indispensable for applicant tracking (job applications), onboarding information collection (new hire paperwork), employee surveys, and event registrations. When a form is submitted, the data automatically updates the contact record in Keap, and can trigger subsequent automation campaigns, streamlining data entry and initiating follow-up actions without manual intervention.

Landing Pages

Landing Pages in Keap are standalone web pages designed with a specific goal, such as capturing lead information, promoting a job opening, or encouraging registration for a recruiting event. These pages are typically stripped of complex navigation to focus the visitor’s attention on a single call to action, often featuring a Keap form. For recruiting, a landing page might showcase a high-priority job role, collecting candidate applications directly into Keap. For HR, it could be used for internal training sign-ups or benefits enrollment, providing a focused, conversion-optimized experience that integrates seamlessly with your Keap automation.

Automation Builder

The Automation Builder is Keap’s visual interface for creating and managing campaigns and workflows. It allows users to drag-and-drop elements like forms, emails, sequences, and decision points to construct complex automated processes. For HR and recruiting professionals, this intuitive tool empowers them to design sophisticated workflows for candidate nurturing, interview scheduling, offer letter generation, employee onboarding, and performance review reminders. The visual nature of the builder makes it easy to understand the flow of information and actions, allowing non-technical users to build powerful automations that save significant time and resources.

Custom Fields

Custom Fields in Keap allow you to extend the standard contact record by adding specific data points relevant to your unique HR and recruiting processes. While Keap provides essential fields, custom fields enable you to track highly specific information such as a candidate’s desired salary, visa status, specific skill proficiencies, preferred start date, or employee department. These fields are critical for comprehensive data management and segmentation. By capturing nuanced data, you can build more targeted reports, create more precise automation triggers, and deliver highly personalized experiences to candidates and employees alike.

Lead Scoring

Lead Scoring in Keap is a system that assigns numerical values to contacts based on their engagement with your content and their fit with your ideal candidate or client profile. Points are added or subtracted based on actions like opening emails, visiting specific web pages, submitting forms, or having certain tags. For recruiters, lead scoring helps prioritize warm candidates, indicating who is most engaged and likely to move forward in the hiring process. For HR, it can help identify employees most likely to participate in training programs or those who meet certain criteria for internal promotions, ensuring focus on the most promising individuals.

Opportunity (Pipeline)

An Opportunity in Keap represents a potential progression or deal within your business, tracked through a sales pipeline. While traditionally for sales, HR and recruiting professionals can adapt this feature to manage their hiring pipelines. Each stage in the pipeline (e.g., “Application Received,” “Phone Screen,” “Interview Scheduled,” “Offer Extended,” “Hired”) represents the progress of a candidate through the recruitment process. This visual management tool helps recruiters track the status of multiple candidates for various roles, identify bottlenecks, and forecast hiring needs. It brings a structured, systematic approach to managing the candidate journey.

Internal Forms

Internal Forms in Keap are forms designed for use by your internal team members to update contact records or trigger internal processes. Unlike public-facing forms, these are typically accessed by staff. For HR, internal forms are invaluable for documenting interview feedback, initiating new hire paperwork (e.g., managers submitting new employee details), processing employee change requests, or recording performance reviews. They standardize data collection from internal stakeholders, ensuring consistent data entry and seamlessly triggering subsequent automated tasks or notifications to relevant team members, thereby improving inter-departmental communication.

Integrations

Integrations refer to the ability of Keap to connect and exchange data with other software applications. Keap offers native integrations with popular tools and can also connect with thousands more via third-party connectors like Make.com (formerly Integromat) or Zapier. For HR and recruiting, integrations are critical for creating a cohesive tech stack. Examples include syncing Keap with your applicant tracking system (ATS), payroll software, online assessment tools, background check services, or calendar scheduling apps. Seamless integrations eliminate manual data entry, reduce errors, and create end-to-end automated workflows that drastically improve efficiency.

User Roles & Permissions

User Roles and Permissions in Keap allow administrators to control what actions each team member can perform and what data they can access within the platform. This feature is crucial for maintaining data security, privacy, and operational integrity, especially in sensitive areas like HR and recruiting. For example, a recruiter might have access to candidate data but not sensitive employee payroll information, while an HR manager might have broader access but limited administrative privileges. Properly configuring user roles ensures compliance, prevents unauthorized data access, and streamlines workflows by giving each user appropriate functionality.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Keap Data Recovery: The 5-Step Checklist for HR & Recruiting Firms