A Glossary of Key Keap Contact Management Terms for HR & Recruiting Professionals

For HR and recruiting professionals navigating the complexities of talent acquisition and employee management, understanding your CRM system is paramount. Keap, a powerful platform for contact management and automation, offers a suite of features that, when leveraged effectively, can transform your workflows. This glossary defines essential Keap terms, explaining their significance and practical application in an HR and recruiting context, helping you optimize your operations and streamline your talent pipeline.

Contact Record

In Keap, a Contact Record is the fundamental unit of information, representing an individual (e.g., a candidate, employee, or client). Each record holds comprehensive data such as name, contact details, company affiliation, communication history, and custom fields. For HR and recruiting, a robust Contact Record is crucial for building a holistic profile of every candidate. It allows recruiters to track application stages, interview notes, skills, salary expectations, and even pre-employment assessment results, ensuring no critical data point is lost. Automating updates to these records based on candidate actions, like completing an online form or engaging with an email, significantly reduces manual data entry and improves data accuracy, fostering a single source of truth for all talent-related interactions.

Tag

A Tag in Keap is a label or keyword applied to a Contact Record for segmentation and organization. Tags are highly versatile and act as powerful identifiers, allowing you to categorize contacts based on specific characteristics, actions, or stages in a process. In HR and recruiting, tags are indispensable for segmenting your talent pool. Examples include “Active Candidate,” “Passive Candidate,” “Software Engineer,” “Interviewed – Round 1,” “Offer Extended,” or “Onboarding In Progress.” By tagging contacts, recruiters can quickly filter their database, initiate targeted communications (e.g., sending role-specific job alerts), or trigger automation sequences (e.g., sending onboarding documents once an “Offer Accepted” tag is applied). This precision targeting saves time and enhances the personalization of candidate experiences.

Campaign

A Keap Campaign is an automated series of marketing or sales actions designed to guide contacts through a predefined journey. Campaigns consist of sequences, emails, webforms, landing pages, and other elements, all working together to achieve a specific goal. For HR and recruiting, campaigns are invaluable for automating candidate nurturing, engagement, and onboarding processes. Imagine a “New Applicant Campaign” that automatically sends a confirmation email, schedules a preliminary screening call, and provides resources to prepare for interviews. Or an “Employee Onboarding Campaign” that delivers welcome messages, policy documents, and training modules over the first few weeks. Campaigns ensure consistent communication, reduce manual follow-up, and provide a structured, scalable approach to managing the candidate and employee lifecycle.

Automation

Automation in Keap refers to the system’s ability to perform actions automatically based on predefined triggers and conditions. These “if-this-then-that” rules streamline repetitive tasks and ensure timely execution without manual intervention. In the HR and recruiting world, automation is a game-changer. For instance, when a candidate submits an application (trigger), an automation can automatically send a thank-you email, apply an “Applicant” tag to their contact record, create a new “Opportunity” in the recruiting pipeline, and notify the hiring manager. This not only frees up recruiters’ time from administrative burdens but also improves response times, reduces human error, and ensures a consistent, professional experience for every candidate.

Pipeline/Opportunity

In Keap, a Pipeline (often associated with Opportunities) is a visual representation of a process or sales funnel, broken down into distinct stages. Each Opportunity represents a specific deal or project (e.g., a potential hire) moving through these stages. For HR and recruiting, the Pipeline feature is perfectly adaptable for managing the candidate journey. Stages might include “Application Received,” “Screening,” “Interview – Round 1,” “Interview – Round 2,” “Offer Extended,” “Offer Accepted,” and “Hired.” This visual workflow allows recruiting teams to track candidates’ progress at a glance, identify bottlenecks, forecast hiring needs, and ensure that no candidate falls through the cracks. Automation can be used to move candidates between stages based on actions, further streamlining the process.

Lead Score

Lead Scoring in Keap is a method of assigning numerical values to contacts based on their engagement, demographics, and actions, indicating their level of interest or fit. Contacts accumulate points for actions like opening emails, visiting specific web pages, or filling out forms, while points might be deducted for inactivity. In a recruiting context, Lead Scoring can be adapted to Candidate Scoring. Recruiters can assign points for relevant skills, experience, qualifications, or engagement with recruiting content. A high candidate score might indicate a stronger fit for a role, prompting immediate outreach. This allows HR teams to prioritize candidates, focus their efforts on the most promising talent, and avoid spending excessive time on less suitable applicants.

Webform

A Keap Webform is a customizable online form used to capture information from visitors to your website or landing pages. These forms can be embedded directly onto web pages or linked as standalone pages. For HR and recruiting, webforms are essential for collecting applicant data, screening questions, event registrations (e.g., career fairs), or internal employee surveys. When a candidate submits a webform (e.g., a job application), the data automatically populates their Contact Record in Keap. This seamless data capture eliminates manual data entry, ensures data consistency, and can immediately trigger automation sequences, such as sending an application confirmation or initiating a welcome campaign.

Landing Page

A Keap Landing Page is a standalone web page designed with a specific goal, such as capturing lead information, promoting an event, or presenting a job opening. Unlike a regular website page, landing pages are optimized for conversion, often featuring a webform and a clear call to action. In HR and recruiting, landing pages are powerful tools for attracting and converting talent. You can create dedicated landing pages for specific job postings, talent pool sign-ups (e.g., “Join our Talent Network for future opportunities”), or for promoting employer branding content. When a candidate completes a form on a landing page, their information is automatically added to Keap, and relevant tags and automations can be applied to nurture them.

Broadcast

A Keap Broadcast is a one-time email or SMS message sent to a specific segment of your contact list. Unlike emails within a campaign, broadcasts are not part of an automated sequence but are sent manually for immediate communications. For HR and recruiting, broadcasts are useful for urgent or timely communications. This might include announcing a new job opening, sending a newsletter to your talent network, updating candidates on a hiring event, or sharing important company-wide announcements with employees. Broadcasts allow recruiters to quickly disseminate information to a targeted audience without building an entire campaign, ensuring rapid and direct communication when needed.

Sequence

Within a Keap Campaign, a Sequence is a series of automated steps that contacts move through, typically over a period of time. These steps can include sending emails, applying tags, assigning tasks, or waiting for a specific delay. Sequences are the building blocks of campaigns, allowing for structured, time-based nurturing. In an HR context, a “Candidate Nurturing Sequence” might send a series of emails over several weeks, sharing company culture insights, employee testimonials, and benefits information to keep passive candidates engaged. An “Onboarding Sequence” could deliver compliance documents, welcome videos, and check-in surveys at predefined intervals, ensuring a smooth transition for new hires and reducing manual oversight.

Lifecycle Automation

Keap’s Lifecycle Automation is a framework for structuring your entire contact management and automation strategy around the different stages of a customer’s (or in our case, candidate/employee’s) journey with your organization. It typically involves stages like “Lead,” “Prospect,” “Customer,” and “Advocate,” each with its own specific automations. For HR and recruiting, this translates to mapping out the entire candidate and employee lifecycle: “Applicant,” “Candidate,” “Hired,” “Employee,” “Alumni.” By designing automations for each stage, HR teams can ensure a consistent, personalized, and efficient experience from initial application through onboarding, employment, and even offboarding, creating a truly holistic approach to talent management.

User/Team Member

In Keap, a User or Team Member is an individual within your organization who has access to your Keap application. Each user can be assigned specific permissions, controlling what they can view and edit within the CRM. For HR and recruiting, effective management of users is critical for collaboration and data security. Recruiters, hiring managers, and HR administrators would each have their own Keap user accounts, with permissions tailored to their roles. For instance, a recruiter might have full access to candidate pipelines and communication tools, while a hiring manager might only view candidates relevant to their specific roles and have limited editing capabilities, ensuring data integrity and compliance.

Custom Field

A Keap Custom Field allows you to extend the standard data fields available for a Contact Record, enabling you to store unique information specific to your business needs. These fields can be text, numbers, dates, dropdowns, or checkboxes. In HR and recruiting, custom fields are incredibly powerful for capturing specialized candidate data that standard CRM fields don’t cover. Examples include “Desired Salary,” “Visa Sponsorship Required,” “Technical Skills (multi-select),” “Availability for Interview,” or “Last Performance Review Date.” Leveraging custom fields ensures that all pertinent information is stored directly within the candidate’s Keap record, making it easily accessible for search, segmentation, and personalized outreach, preventing data silos.

Email Builder

The Keap Email Builder is a drag-and-drop tool that allows users to create professional, branded emails for campaigns and broadcasts without needing coding knowledge. It offers templates, content blocks, and personalization options to craft engaging messages. For HR and recruiting, a user-friendly email builder is essential for effective communication with candidates and employees. Recruiters can quickly design branded job offer letters, candidate interview confirmations, onboarding welcome emails, or internal announcements. The ability to personalize emails with contact-specific information (like a candidate’s name or the specific job title they applied for) significantly enhances the candidate experience, making communications feel more personal and less automated.

Integrations

Integrations in Keap refer to the connections between Keap and other third-party software applications. These connections allow data to flow seamlessly between systems, automating workflows across different platforms. For HR and recruiting, integrations are vital for building a cohesive tech stack. Examples include integrating Keap with an applicant tracking system (ATS) like Workable, a calendar scheduling tool like Calendly, a document signing tool like PandaDoc, or even a payroll system. Such integrations eliminate manual data transfer, reduce errors, and create end-to-end automated workflows. For instance, when a candidate moves to “Offer Accepted” in Keap, an integration could automatically trigger the creation of a contract in PandaDoc and initiate the new hire setup in a payroll system, saving countless hours.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: The Ultimate Guide to Keap CRM Data Protection for HR & Recruiting: Backup, Recovery, and 5 Critical Post-Restore Validation Steps