A Glossary of Keap CRM Automation & Workflow Terminology for HR & Recruiting Professionals
Navigating the landscape of CRM automation can unlock unparalleled efficiency for HR and recruiting teams. Keap CRM, a powerful platform, offers robust features to streamline candidate management, communication, and onboarding processes. However, to truly harness its potential, it’s essential to understand the core terminology that underpins its functionality. This glossary provides clear, authoritative definitions tailored specifically for HR and recruiting professionals, explaining how these key terms apply practically to optimize your talent acquisition and management workflows. By understanding these concepts, you can leverage Keap to save valuable time, reduce human error, and elevate the candidate experience.
Keap CRM
Keap CRM serves as a centralized hub for managing candidate relationships and automating recruiting workflows. For HR and recruiting professionals, it’s more than just a contact database; it’s a strategic tool designed to organize applicant information, track communication history, and automate follow-ups throughout the entire hiring journey. Keap helps teams move candidates efficiently from application to offer acceptance and even into onboarding, ensuring no lead is dropped and every interaction is personalized. It allows for detailed candidate profiling through custom fields and tags, making it easier to segment talent pools and engage with specific candidate groups effectively, ultimately saving countless hours previously spent on manual data entry and communication tasks.
Automation
In the context of Keap CRM, automation refers to the process of programming the system to perform tasks automatically based on predefined triggers and conditions. For HR and recruiting, this translates into significant time savings and consistency. Imagine automatically sending a confirmation email to every candidate who applies, scheduling an initial phone screen when they meet certain criteria, or sending timely follow-up messages after an interview. Keap automation eliminates repetitive manual work, reduces the risk of human error, and ensures a standardized, positive experience for every candidate. This allows recruiters to focus on high-value activities like candidate engagement and strategic planning, rather than administrative overhead.
Campaign
A Keap Campaign is a multi-step, automated sequence of actions designed to guide contacts (or candidates) through a specific journey. For HR and recruiting, campaigns are instrumental in managing various stages of the talent pipeline. Examples include an “Applicant Nurture Campaign” that provides candidates with company culture insights, an “Interview Follow-Up Campaign” sending timely reminders and feedback requests, or an “Onboarding Campaign” automating welcome messages and essential document distribution. Campaigns are visually built with drag-and-drop tools, making it easy to design complex workflows that trigger emails, tasks, tags, and more, based on candidate behavior or data updates within their profile.
Sequence
A Sequence in Keap CRM is a specific series of automated steps within a broader Campaign, typically focused on a particular communication or task flow. For recruiting teams, a sequence might be used to send a series of three follow-up emails to a candidate who hasn’t responded after an initial outreach, or to deliver a staggered set of orientation materials to new hires over their first week. Sequences are time-based or action-based, meaning steps can be scheduled to occur after a certain delay (e.g., “send email 3 days later”) or in response to a specific interaction (e.g., “if candidate clicks link, move to next step”). They provide granular control over the timing and content of automated communications.
Tag
Tags are customizable labels used in Keap CRM to categorize and segment contacts (candidates). For HR and recruiting, tags are incredibly powerful for organizing talent pools. Examples include “Interviewed – Round 1,” “Qualified – Sales Role,” “Rejected – Follow Up in 6 Months,” “Passive Candidate,” or “Employee – Department X.” Tags allow recruiters to quickly identify groups of candidates based on specific criteria, enabling highly targeted communication and workflow automation. For instance, applying the “Interviewed – Round 1” tag can automatically trigger a feedback request campaign to the interviewer and a “next steps” email to the candidate, streamlining post-interview processes.
Custom Field
A Custom Field in Keap CRM is a user-defined data field that allows HR and recruiting professionals to store specific, relevant information about candidates beyond the standard contact details. This is crucial for capturing unique data points pertinent to hiring, such as “Desired Salary,” “Availability Date,” “Notice Period,” “Portfolio URL,” “ATS Candidate ID,” or “Preferred Interview Time.” By creating custom fields, teams can maintain a comprehensive and highly detailed candidate profile within Keap, making it easier to filter, search, and automate actions based on specific criteria, ensuring all critical information is readily accessible for informed decision-making.
Lead Scoring (Contact Scoring)
Lead Scoring, often referred to as Contact Scoring in Keap, is a system that assigns numerical values to candidates based on their engagement and fit, helping HR and recruiting teams prioritize their efforts. For example, a candidate might receive points for interacting with a job posting, having specific skills listed in their profile, or responding promptly to communications. Conversely, they might lose points for inactivity. In a recruiting context, high-scoring candidates are typically those who are most engaged and best aligned with open roles, indicating they are more likely to be a good fit and worth prioritizing for outreach and interviews. This systematic approach streamlines candidate evaluation and accelerates the hiring process.
Pipeline
A Pipeline in Keap CRM is a visual representation of the stages a contact (or candidate) moves through within a specific process, such as the recruitment cycle. For HR and recruiting, a recruitment pipeline might include stages like “Application Received,” “Screening,” “Interview – Round 1,” “Interview – Round 2,” “Offer Extended,” and “Hired.” This visual tool allows recruiters to quickly see where each candidate stands in the hiring process, identify bottlenecks, and manage workloads more effectively. Candidates can be manually moved between stages or automatically advanced based on triggers, providing a clear, trackable path from initial interest to successful placement.
Integration
Integration refers to the seamless connection and data exchange between Keap CRM and other third-party software applications used in HR and recruiting. This could include Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), HR Information Systems (HRIS), calendar scheduling tools, background check services, or communication platforms. By integrating Keap with these tools, recruiting teams can create a unified ecosystem, eliminating manual data transfer, reducing errors, and ensuring that all systems have the most up-to-date candidate information. For instance, an integration might automatically sync new applicants from an ATS into Keap, or push hired candidate data from Keap into an HRIS, creating a truly automated workflow.
Webhook
A Webhook is an automated message sent from one application to another when a specific event occurs. In Keap CRM, webhooks are crucial for extending its automation capabilities by connecting with external systems that don’t have native integrations. For HR and recruiting, a webhook can act as a trigger, sending data out of Keap when a tag is applied (e.g., “Candidate Interview Scheduled”), a custom field is updated (e.g., “Offer Accepted”), or a campaign goal is achieved. This allows platforms like Make.com to catch the webhook, process the data, and then initiate actions in virtually any other integrated application, enabling highly customized and complex cross-platform automations essential for modern recruiting.
Trigger
A Trigger is the specific event or condition that initiates an automation within Keap CRM. For HR and recruiting, understanding triggers is fundamental to designing effective workflows. Common triggers include “Form Submitted” (e.g., a job application), “Tag Applied” (e.g., ‘Qualified Candidate’), “Email Opened” or “Link Clicked” (indicating engagement), or a “Contact Reaches a Campaign Goal” (e.g., completes an initial screening questionnaire). When a trigger event occurs, Keap automatically executes the predefined actions associated with that trigger, streamlining candidate management and ensuring timely responses without manual intervention, saving countless hours for recruiters.
Action
An Action in Keap CRM refers to the specific task or operation that is performed automatically once a trigger is met within a campaign or automation rule. For HR and recruiting, actions are the backbone of automated workflows. Examples include “Send Email” (e.g., an interview confirmation), “Add Tag” (e.g., ‘Moved to Interview Stage’), “Create Task” (e.g., ‘Call Candidate for Screening’), “Update Contact Record” (e.g., changing their status), or “Move to another Campaign.” These actions eliminate repetitive manual tasks, ensuring consistency, improving communication speed, and allowing recruiters to focus their energy on building relationships rather than administrative processes.
API (Application Programming Interface)
An API, or Application Programming Interface, is a set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate and exchange data with each other programmatically. For HR and recruiting professionals using Keap, the API is the underlying mechanism that enables advanced integrations and custom automations. While Keap offers many native integrations, its API allows for bespoke connections with specialized ATS, HRIS, or custom internal tools. It means developers or automation specialists can build custom solutions to pull candidate data, update records, or trigger complex workflows between Keap and other systems, ensuring a seamless data flow across the entire tech stack.
Data Segmentation
Data Segmentation in Keap CRM is the process of dividing your contact database (candidates) into smaller, distinct groups based on shared characteristics or behaviors. For HR and recruiting, this is vital for targeted communication and personalized outreach. Segments can be created using tags, custom field values, engagement levels, or pipeline stages. Examples include “Candidates for Senior Leadership Roles,” “Entry-Level Applicants – Marketing,” “Passive Candidates – Tech,” or “Previous Applicants – Not Hired.” Effective segmentation allows recruiting teams to send highly relevant job alerts, nurture campaigns, or event invitations to specific candidate pools, enhancing engagement and improving the quality of applications received.
Workflow
A Workflow, in a broader sense, describes a sequence of operations or tasks performed to achieve a specific outcome. Within Keap CRM, a workflow encompasses the entire series of automated and potentially manual steps designed to manage a process, such as candidate recruitment or new hire onboarding. While “Campaigns” are Keap’s primary tool for building these, “workflow” is a more encompassing term that includes how Keap interacts with other systems via integrations, webhooks, and APIs to create a comprehensive, end-to-end automated process. For HR and recruiting, optimized workflows ensure efficiency, consistency, and a superior experience for both candidates and hiring managers, from initial application to successful placement.
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