A Glossary of Key Keap CRM Core Functionality Terms for HR & Recruiting Professionals

For HR leaders and recruiting professionals, navigating the robust features of Keap CRM can unlock significant operational efficiencies, but only if you speak its language. This glossary is designed to demystify the core functionalities within Keap, translating complex terms into practical insights for managing candidates, automating communications, and streamlining your entire recruitment process. Understanding these terms is the first step towards leveraging Keap to save time, reduce human error, and scale your talent acquisition efforts.

Contact Record

At the heart of Keap CRM, a Contact Record serves as the central repository for all information related to an individual. For HR and recruiting professionals, this means a comprehensive profile for each candidate, employee, or hiring manager. Beyond basic contact details, a Contact Record can store their resume, interview notes, relevant skills, preferred communication methods, application history, and progress through various hiring stages. This centralized approach ensures that every team member has access to the most up-to-date and complete candidate profile, fostering a truly single source of truth for your talent pool. It’s crucial for maintaining clear communication and tracking every touchpoint, from initial outreach to successful onboarding.

Tag

Tags are a powerful segmentation tool within Keap, allowing you to categorize and label your contacts based on specific attributes or actions. In an HR context, tags are invaluable for segmenting candidates by skill set (e.g., “Senior Software Engineer,” “Marketing Specialist”), experience level (“Entry-Level,” “Management”), location (“Remote-Eligible,” “New York”), application status (“Interviewed,” “Offer Extended”), or even specific hiring pipeline stages. These tags can then be used to trigger automated campaigns, create targeted reports, or quickly filter your database to find the perfect candidate for a new role. Effective tagging is foundational to personalized outreach and efficient talent pool management.

Campaign

A Keap Campaign is an automated sequence of actions designed to nurture, engage, or follow up with contacts based on specific triggers and conditions. For recruiting, campaigns are game-changers for automating candidate communication. Imagine a campaign that automatically sends a “thank you” email after an application, schedules a follow-up reminder for an interviewer, delivers interview preparation materials, or initiates a pre-onboarding sequence. Campaigns can include emails, text messages, internal task assignments, and even conditional logic that branches candidates to different paths based on their responses or updated tags. This automation reduces manual effort, ensures timely communication, and enhances the candidate experience.

Automation Builder

The Automation Builder is Keap’s intuitive visual interface where you design and construct your campaigns and other automated workflows. It uses a drag-and-drop interface with various elements like sequences, goals, and decision diamonds, allowing you to map out complex processes with ease. For HR, this means you can visually build out entire recruitment workflows: from initial lead capture via a webform, through various interview stages, to offer acceptance and onboarding. The Automation Builder empowers professionals to create sophisticated, logic-driven systems without needing to write a single line of code, ensuring that your automated processes accurately reflect your hiring strategy and adapt to candidate behavior.

Lead Score

Lead Scoring is a mechanism within Keap that assigns numerical values to contacts based on their engagement, demographic information, and behaviors. While traditionally used for sales, in recruiting, it can be repurposed as a “Candidate Score.” This allows you to quantify a candidate’s suitability or engagement level, helping recruiters prioritize their efforts. For instance, a candidate might gain points for opening emails, visiting career pages, having specific skills (based on tags), or engaging with recruitment content. Conversely, they might lose points for inactivity. A high Candidate Score can automatically flag a promising candidate, triggering a direct outreach campaign or an internal notification to a hiring manager, optimizing the recruiter’s valuable time.

Opportunity

In Keap, an Opportunity represents a potential sales deal, but it can be effectively repurposed in HR to track a candidate’s progress through your recruitment funnel for a specific job opening. Each Opportunity can have its own value (e.g., potential salary), a probability of success, and, most importantly, a distinct stage within a Pipeline. For recruiting, this means tracking a candidate from “Applied” to “Phone Screen,” “First Interview,” “Offer Extended,” and “Hired.” Managing Opportunities within Keap provides a clear, organized view of active candidate processes, enabling accurate forecasting of hires and identification of bottlenecks in your recruitment workflow.

Pipeline

A Pipeline is a visual representation of the stages an Opportunity moves through, from initiation to completion. For recruiting professionals, setting up distinct Pipelines for different types of roles or hiring processes (e.g., “Full-Time Roles,” “Contractors,” “Executive Search”) offers unparalleled clarity. Each stage within a Pipeline (e.g., “New Application,” “Recruiter Review,” “Technical Interview,” “Reference Check,” “Offer Stage”) can have specific tasks or automated actions associated with it. This visual structure allows hiring teams to quickly see where all candidates stand, identify potential bottlenecks, and ensure a consistent, structured hiring process, improving efficiency and candidate experience.

Webform

A Keap Webform is a customizable online form used to capture information from website visitors or landing page leads. For HR and recruiting, webforms are critical for collecting job applications, candidate interest forms, employee feedback, or event registrations for career fairs. These forms can be embedded directly onto your career page or linked from job boards. When a webform is submitted, Keap automatically creates or updates a Contact Record and can trigger an immediate automation (e.g., sending a confirmation email, adding a “New Applicant” tag, or creating an internal task for a recruiter). Webforms streamline the initial data collection phase, ensuring all necessary information is captured consistently.

Broadcast

A Broadcast in Keap refers to a one-time mass communication, typically an email, sent to a segmented group of contacts. Unlike automated campaigns, broadcasts are manual, ad-hoc messages. For HR and recruiting, broadcasts are essential for sending out urgent job alerts, company-wide announcements, updates on benefits, invitations to hiring events, or holiday greetings to your talent pool or current employees. You can segment your audience using tags or saved searches to ensure the message is relevant to the recipients, making it a versatile tool for timely and targeted large-scale communication without the need for a pre-built sequence.

Follow-Up Sequence

While often used interchangeably with “Campaign” in common parlance, within Keap, a Follow-Up Sequence (or simply a “Sequence” within the Automation Builder) specifically refers to a series of automated emails, tasks, or other communications designed to nurture contacts over time. It’s a key component within a broader campaign. For recruitment, a follow-up sequence might involve sending a series of emails to passive candidates showcasing company culture, sharing relevant industry insights, or reminding them about upcoming application deadlines. These sequences are crucial for staying top-of-mind with candidates, maintaining engagement, and gradually moving them towards applying or accepting an offer, all while automating the process.

Task

A Task in Keap is an internal action item assigned to a user (an individual team member) or a team, with a specific due date. For HR and recruiting, tasks are vital for managing the operational aspects of hiring. This could include “Review Resume for [Candidate Name],” “Schedule Phone Screen with [Candidate Name],” “Send Interviewer Brief,” “Follow up with Hiring Manager,” or “Prepare Offer Letter.” Tasks can be manually created or automatically generated by campaigns, ensuring that critical steps in the recruitment process are never missed and responsibilities are clearly assigned, improving accountability and workflow efficiency.

Note

Notes are free-form text entries attached to a Contact Record, used to record specific interactions, observations, or key details that don’t fit into structured fields. For recruiting teams, diligent note-taking is essential. This includes summaries of phone calls, interview feedback, insights gathered from candidate research, specific candidate preferences (e.g., “prefers remote work,” “available for interviews Tuesdays”), or any other qualitative data. Well-maintained notes provide context and history, allowing any team member to quickly get up to speed on a candidate’s journey and ensuring a consistent and informed approach throughout the hiring process.

Product/Service

In Keap, Products and Services are items that can be sold, quoted, or included in orders. While primarily a sales and e-commerce feature, HR and recruiting teams can creatively adapt this functionality. For instance, “Products” could represent different types of job postings, recruitment services offered to internal departments, or even training modules for new hires. Defining these items allows for clearer internal invoicing, tracking the cost associated with different recruitment channels, or managing different service-level agreements for talent acquisition within a larger organization. It provides a structured way to quantify and categorize the services involved in the hiring lifecycle.

Order

An Order in Keap typically represents a transaction where a customer purchases a product or service. While not directly applicable to candidate management, HR departments might utilize this feature for internal tracking or when managing external recruitment agency relationships. For example, an “Order” could track the procurement of a specific recruitment service package, or the cost associated with a particular job board advertisement. It provides a structured record of financial commitments related to talent acquisition, allowing for better budget management and ROI analysis of recruitment expenditures within the Keap system.

Integration

Integration refers to connecting Keap with other third-party software and platforms, enabling seamless data flow and extended functionality. For HR and recruiting professionals, integrations are paramount for building a cohesive tech stack. This might include integrating Keap with HRIS systems, applicant tracking systems (ATS), calendaring tools (e.g., Calendly for interview scheduling), communication platforms (e.g., Slack for internal notifications), or document management systems (e.g., PandaDoc for offer letters). Effective integrations eliminate manual data entry, reduce errors, and create end-to-end automated workflows that save significant time and improve the overall efficiency of your talent acquisition operations.

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