A Glossary of Key Terms: Mastering Keap-Specific Data Entities for HR & Recruiting
Understanding the specific terminology and data structures within Keap is crucial for HR and recruiting professionals looking to optimize their operations through automation. Misinterpreting these core entities can lead to inefficient workflows, data inconsistencies, and missed opportunities for strategic growth. This glossary provides clear, authoritative definitions for approximately 15 key Keap-specific data entities, explaining their relevance and practical application in the context of human resources, recruitment, and business automation.
Contact Record
In Keap, a Contact Record is the fundamental data entity representing an individual person. This record stores all associated information, including personal details, communication history, linked companies, engagement activities, and any custom fields relevant to their interaction with your organization. For HR and recruiting professionals, Contact Records are central to managing candidate profiles, employee data, client contacts, and vendor information. Proper management of these records ensures a single source of truth for each person, facilitating personalized communication, targeted follow-ups, and streamlined candidate pipelines. Automation often begins or ends with updating or retrieving data from a Contact Record, ensuring that every interaction, from application submission to onboarding, is tracked and acted upon.
Company Record
A Company Record in Keap serves as a dedicated entity to store information about organizations, businesses, or departments. While Contact Records focus on individuals, Company Records aggregate data pertinent to the entity itself, such as industry, size, website, and associated contacts. In an HR or recruiting context, this is vital for managing prospective client companies, current employer partners, and vendor organizations. Linking individual candidates or client contacts to their respective Company Records provides a holistic view of relationships and aids in account-based recruiting strategies or client management. Automating updates to Company Records ensures accurate employer branding, client segmentation, and reporting on organizational engagements.
Opportunity Record
An Opportunity Record in Keap represents a potential sales engagement, project, or defined stage in a process flow, tracked through various pipeline stages. While often associated with sales, in HR and recruiting, an Opportunity can effectively model a candidate’s journey through a hiring pipeline, a client’s progression through a service onboarding, or a project’s lifecycle. Each Opportunity allows for tracking value, specific products/services, and associated contacts. Leveraging Opportunities for recruiting allows for clear visualization of talent pipelines, measuring conversion rates at each stage, and automating actions like sending interview confirmations or offer letters as candidates advance.
Tag
Tags are flexible, searchable labels applied to Contact Records (and sometimes Company Records) in Keap to categorize, segment, and trigger automation. Unlike custom fields, tags are simple keywords or phrases that can be applied in multiples, making them incredibly powerful for segmentation. For HR and recruiting, tags are indispensable for organizing candidates by skill set, experience level, job interest, source, or status (e.g., “Python Developer,” “Interviewed,” “Onboarding Pending”). Tags act as the primary triggers for many Keap automation sequences, allowing for highly targeted follow-ups, drip campaigns, and internal notifications based on a contact’s attributes or actions.
Custom Field
Custom Fields in Keap allow users to extend the standard data fields available for Contact, Company, and Opportunity Records, enabling the capture of unique information relevant to specific business needs. These fields can be text, number, date, dropdowns, or radio buttons. In HR and recruiting, custom fields are essential for storing highly specific data like desired salary, visa status, specific certifications, preferred start date, or a custom candidate ID. Properly designed custom fields ensure that all critical data points are collected and standardized, which is vital for accurate reporting, compliance, and driving nuanced automation based on specific criteria that standard fields cannot accommodate.
Campaign
A Keap Campaign is a comprehensive marketing or operational automation strategy designed to guide contacts through a defined journey. It is a visual builder where users can design sequences of emails, texts, tasks, and other actions triggered by specific events (e.g., form submissions, tag application, purchase). For HR and recruiting, campaigns are invaluable for automating candidate nurturing, onboarding sequences, employee engagement programs, or client follow-ups. A well-constructed campaign ensures consistent communication, reduces manual workload, and delivers a professional experience at scale, from initial application acknowledgment to post-hire check-ins.
Sequence
A Sequence is a modular component within a Keap Campaign, representing a series of automated actions that contacts enter into and progress through. Sequences can include emails, tasks, timers, and internal processes. Multiple sequences can be linked within a single campaign to create complex journeys. In recruiting, a sequence might handle the initial applicant screening process, sending automated skill assessments, or guiding new hires through their first week’s activities. The granular control offered by sequences allows for precise timing of communications and actions, ensuring candidates receive relevant information at the right stage of their journey without manual intervention.
Automation Builder
The Automation Builder (formerly Campaign Builder) is Keap’s drag-and-drop interface for creating and visualizing automated workflows. It allows users to define triggers (e.g., form submission, tag application, product purchase) and connect them to sequences that contain a series of actions. For HR and recruiting, this visual tool simplifies the design of complex processes like candidate lead scoring, interview scheduling automation, pre-onboarding checklists, or employee feedback loops. The Automation Builder empowers professionals to design intricate, multi-step processes that operate automatically, ensuring consistency, reducing human error, and freeing up valuable time for high-value strategic work.
API (Application Programming Interface)
An API is a set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate and exchange data. Keap’s API enables external systems and custom applications to interact programmatically with Keap data entities like contacts, companies, opportunities, and campaigns. For HR and recruiting teams, the Keap API is critical for advanced integration with external systems such as applicant tracking systems (ATS), HRIS platforms, payroll software, or custom internal dashboards. It facilitates the seamless flow of data, enabling real-time synchronization, advanced reporting, and the creation of highly customized automation solutions that extend beyond Keap’s native capabilities, saving significant manual data entry time.
Webhook
A Webhook is an automated message sent from one application to another when a specific event occurs, essentially a “user-defined HTTP callback.” In Keap, webhooks can be configured to send data to an external URL whenever an event happens (e.g., a contact is tagged, a form is submitted). For HR and recruiting, webhooks are powerful tools for real-time integration with other systems without constant polling. For example, when a candidate applies via a Keap form, a webhook can instantly trigger an action in an ATS, a communication platform (like Slack for internal notifications), or a custom analytics dashboard. This immediacy ensures that critical actions or notifications are never delayed, speeding up response times in competitive hiring environments.
Product Record
In Keap, a Product Record defines an item or service that can be sold or tracked. While primarily used for sales and e-commerce, Products can be repurposed in an HR context to represent different types of services, programs, or internal offerings. For instance, a “Recruitment Service Package,” “Employee Training Course,” or “Candidate Assessment Fee” could be set up as products. This allows for tracking specific program enrollments, managing billing for consulting services, or even associating different types of employment contracts with a structured record, enabling reporting and automation around the delivery and tracking of these defined items.
Order Form
An Order Form in Keap is a customizable web page used to collect payment and contact information for products or services. While their primary use is transactional, HR and recruiting professionals can creatively adapt Order Forms. For example, they can be used to process payments for candidate background checks, collect fees for certifications, or even manage enrollment for paid training programs. Beyond payments, Order Forms collect critical contact details and trigger automations based on submission, allowing for a structured and automated way to manage various paid or enrollment-based interactions with candidates, clients, or employees.
Webform
A Keap Webform is a customizable online form used to capture information from website visitors or contacts. Unlike Order Forms, Webforms are purely for data collection and do not handle payments. For HR and recruiting, Webforms are indispensable for collecting applications, scheduling inquiries, gathering candidate feedback, conducting internal surveys, or allowing employees to update their information. Submissions can trigger powerful automations like creating new contact records, applying tags, initiating follow-up sequences, or sending internal notifications, significantly streamlining data intake and process initiation.
Legacy Data Migration
Legacy Data Migration refers to the process of transferring data from older, often outdated systems (legacy systems) into a new, modern system like Keap. For HR and recruiting, this often involves moving vast amounts of candidate historical data, past employee records, client contact lists, and recruitment pipeline information from spreadsheets, older CRM systems, or disparate databases into Keap. Proper planning and execution of data migration are critical to ensure data integrity, prevent loss, and maintain historical context. This process, when automated correctly, forms the bedrock for a unified “single source of truth” within Keap, making all historical data accessible and actionable for new automation initiatives.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, a technology used to manage all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. Keap is an all-in-one CRM and marketing automation platform. In HR and recruiting, a CRM like Keap is repurposed to manage “talent relationships” – tracking candidate interactions, managing client communications, streamlining the hiring process, and automating follow-ups. It provides a centralized hub for all candidate data, communication history, and pipeline progress, enabling HR and recruiting teams to deliver personalized experiences, build stronger talent pools, and convert candidates more efficiently, much like a sales team converts leads.
If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Unbreakable Keap Data: Mastering Incremental Backups for HR & Recruiting
