A Glossary of Key Keap CRM Terms for HR & Talent Acquisition Professionals

In the rapidly evolving landscape of HR and talent acquisition, leveraging powerful CRM platforms like Keap can significantly streamline processes, enhance candidate experiences, and drive recruitment efficiency. However, navigating the specific terminology of any robust CRM is crucial for maximizing its potential. This glossary provides essential Keap CRM definitions, tailored specifically for HR and recruiting professionals, explaining how these concepts can be applied to automate your talent acquisition workflows and integrate seamlessly with your overall operations strategy. Understanding these terms is the first step towards transforming your recruitment efforts into a highly efficient, data-driven engine.

Keap

Keap is a comprehensive sales and marketing automation platform, often categorized as an all-in-one CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution. For HR and talent acquisition professionals, Keap acts as a powerful system for managing candidate relationships, automating communication workflows, tracking application statuses, and nurturing talent pipelines. It centralizes candidate data, automates follow-ups, and personalizes engagement throughout the recruitment lifecycle, effectively transforming potential applicants into engaged candidates. This automation drastically reduces manual administrative tasks, allowing recruiters to focus on strategic outreach and candidate assessment.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

While traditionally focused on managing customer interactions, CRM principles are highly applicable to HR and talent acquisition. In this context, CRM refers to Candidate Relationship Management – a strategy and system for managing and analyzing interactions with current and potential candidates throughout the entire hiring process. A Keap CRM implementation for HR helps manage candidate data, track communications, automate outreach, and improve the candidate experience, from initial contact through onboarding. This systematic approach ensures no candidate falls through the cracks and provides a comprehensive view of talent interactions.

Contact Record

A Contact Record in Keap is the fundamental unit of information for an individual. For HR and recruiting, this record would typically represent a candidate. It stores all pertinent information, including their name, contact details, resume, communication history, application status, interview notes, and any custom fields like preferred role or skill set. Each candidate has a unique contact record, serving as their single source of truth within the system. This centralized record enables recruiters to quickly access all relevant candidate data, ensuring personalized and informed interactions at every stage.

Tag

Tags are labels you can attach to contact records in Keap to categorize them based on specific characteristics, actions, or stages. In HR, tags are incredibly versatile for segmenting your talent pool. Examples include “Java Developer,” “Interviewed – Round 1,” “Passive Candidate,” “Marketing Manager – Applied,” or “Onboarding Complete.” Tags are crucial for targeted communication, triggering automations, and filtering lists for reporting. They enable dynamic segmentation, allowing recruiters to send highly relevant messages to specific groups of candidates, improving engagement and reducing irrelevant outreach.

Campaign

A Keap Campaign is a sequence of automated actions designed to achieve a specific goal, often involving a series of communications and internal processes. For HR, a campaign could manage the entire applicant journey: from initial application confirmation, through interview scheduling, sending pre-interview materials, collecting feedback, and even initiating onboarding tasks. Campaigns are built visually using Keap’s drag-and-drop builder, allowing recruiters to design complex, multi-stage automation flows that respond to candidate actions (e.g., opening an email, submitting a form) or specific time delays, ensuring a consistent and efficient experience.

Sequence

A Sequence is a legacy term in Keap that refers to a series of steps (emails, tasks, delays) designed to nurture contacts over time. While modern Keap campaigns offer more robust branching logic and goal-setting capabilities, sequences still function as linear automation pathways. For HR, a sequence might be used for a drip email series to warm up passive candidates, provide educational content about the company culture, or consistently follow up with candidates who haven’t responded. They ensure timely communication and nurture relationships without constant manual intervention from the recruiting team.

Automation

In Keap, automation refers to predefined actions that the system executes automatically based on triggers or conditions. This is the cornerstone of efficiency for HR and recruiting professionals. Examples include automatically sending an email confirmation when a candidate applies via a web form, assigning a task to a hiring manager when a candidate reaches the interview stage, updating a candidate’s status after an interview, or moving a candidate into an onboarding campaign once an offer is accepted. Automation eliminates repetitive manual tasks, reduces human error, and ensures a consistent, scalable process.

Lead Source

A Lead Source in Keap identifies where a contact (candidate, in our context) originally came from. This could be “LinkedIn,” “Company Career Page,” “Referral,” “Indeed,” “Recruiting Event,” or “Employee Referral Program.” Tracking lead sources is vital for HR and talent acquisition to understand which recruitment channels are most effective in attracting qualified candidates. This data informs strategic decisions about where to invest recruiting budget and effort, optimizing candidate acquisition costs and improving the quality of incoming applications.

Opportunity

An Opportunity in Keap represents a potential business deal or, in the HR context, a potential hire. It’s a record that tracks a candidate’s progression through a specific hiring pipeline for a particular role. An opportunity includes information like the specific job title, the candidate associated with it, the current stage in the hiring process (e.g., “Resume Review,” “Phone Screen,” “On-site Interview,” “Offer Extended”), and the likelihood of success. Managing opportunities helps recruiters visualize and manage multiple candidate pipelines concurrently, ensuring no open requisition is overlooked.

Pipeline (Sales/Recruiting Pipeline)

A Pipeline in Keap is a visual representation of the stages an Opportunity moves through from its initiation to its conclusion. For HR, this means a Recruitment Pipeline maps out every step of the hiring process for a given role or type of role. Stages might include “Application Received,” “Screening,” “Hiring Manager Review,” “Interview Rounds,” “Reference Check,” “Offer,” and “Hired.” Pipelines provide a clear overview of all active candidates, their current status, and allow recruiters to identify bottlenecks, forecast hiring needs, and prioritize their efforts effectively.

Web Form

A Keap Web Form is a customizable online form that captures information from website visitors and creates new contact records or updates existing ones in your Keap CRM. For HR and talent acquisition, web forms are essential for collecting job applications, event registrations (e.g., career fairs), or interest forms from potential candidates. When a candidate submits a web form, it can automatically trigger a Keap campaign, apply tags, and notify the recruiting team, ensuring immediate and consistent follow-up and data capture.

Landing Page

A Keap Landing Page is a standalone web page designed with a specific goal, such as capturing lead information (in HR, this would be candidate information) or promoting a specific job opening. Unlike a standard web page, it typically has minimal navigation to keep the visitor focused on the call to action. HR professionals use Keap landing pages to host specific job descriptions, collect applications via embedded web forms, or promote talent community sign-ups. These pages integrate directly with Keap, ensuring all candidate interactions and data submissions are automatically tracked and processed.

Email Broadcast

An Email Broadcast in Keap is a one-time email sent to a specific segment of your contacts (candidates). Unlike emails within a campaign or sequence, broadcasts are manually initiated and are ideal for announcements, updates, or general communications that aren’t part of an ongoing automated flow. For HR, this might include sending a newsletter to your talent pool, announcing new job openings to relevant tagged candidates, sharing company news, or providing general updates on the hiring process. Broadcasts allow for mass communication while still leveraging Keap’s segmentation capabilities.

Internal Form

An Internal Form in Keap is a form designed for use by your internal team members, not external candidates. For HR, internal forms are invaluable for standardizing data entry, such as recording interview feedback, submitting candidate referrals, documenting offer details, or initiating internal new hire paperwork. When an internal form is submitted, it can update contact records, create tasks for other team members, or trigger specific internal automation workflows, ensuring consistent data collection and process adherence across the recruiting team.

Custom Field

Custom Fields in Keap allow you to store specific pieces of information on a contact record that are not covered by the standard fields (e.g., name, email). For HR and talent acquisition, custom fields are critical for capturing highly specific candidate data relevant to the recruitment process. Examples include “Desired Salary,” “Years of Experience,” “LinkedIn Profile URL,” “Visa Sponsorship Required,” “Source of Referral,” or “Last Interview Date.” These fields ensure that all necessary information is collected and accessible, enabling detailed segmentation and personalized communication.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: The Strategic Value of a Keap Consultant for AI-Powered HR & Talent Acquisition