A Glossary of Key Keap Terminology for HR & Recruiting Professionals

Navigating any new software ecosystem, especially one as powerful as Keap, requires a solid understanding of its core terminology. For HR and recruiting professionals, mastering these terms is not just about understanding the interface, but about unlocking Keap’s full potential to streamline operations, enhance candidate experiences, and automate critical workflows. This glossary provides clear, actionable definitions of essential Keap terms, explaining how each applies directly to your daily tasks in talent acquisition and human resources, ensuring you can leverage automation to save time and drive better outcomes.

Contact Record

A Contact Record in Keap is the foundational data entry for an individual, serving as a comprehensive profile for every lead, candidate, or employee. It consolidates all interactions, personal details, communication history, and custom data fields related to that person. For HR and recruiting professionals, the Contact Record is paramount. It allows you to track a candidate’s journey from initial application to onboarding, store interview notes, manage skill sets, track compliance documents, and log all communications. Automating updates to these records ensures data accuracy, reduces manual entry, and provides a single source of truth for all HR-related information, making talent management more efficient and less prone to human error.

Tagging

Tagging is a dynamic classification system in Keap that allows users to segment and organize contacts based on specific characteristics, actions, or stages in a process. Tags are highly versatile and can represent anything from “Candidate – Interviewed,” “New Hire – Onboarding,” “Employee – Sales Department,” to “Compliance Training Due.” For HR and recruiting, tagging is indispensable for targeted communication, workflow automation, and reporting. You can automatically apply tags when a candidate submits an application, completes a screening, or accepts an offer. This enables precise filtering for email broadcasts, triggers specific automation sequences (e.g., sending onboarding documents), and helps identify specific candidate pools for future roles, significantly enhancing the agility and personalization of your HR operations.

Campaign Builder

The Campaign Builder is Keap’s visual drag-and-drop interface for designing and implementing automated marketing and operational workflows. It allows users to create sequences of actions triggered by specific events or conditions. In an HR and recruiting context, the Campaign Builder is a game-changer for automating repetitive tasks and ensuring consistent communication. You can design campaigns for applicant nurturing, interview scheduling, new hire onboarding, benefits enrollment reminders, or even internal employee communications. A campaign might start with a web form submission, followed by an automated email sequence, task assignments for recruiters, and tag applications. This centralizes and visualizes complex processes, drastically reducing manual effort and improving the candidate and employee experience.

Sequence

Within the Campaign Builder, a Sequence is a series of automated steps executed in a predefined order. These steps can include sending emails, applying tags, assigning tasks, setting timers, or updating contact fields. Sequences are the operational heart of any Keap campaign, allowing for the meticulous orchestration of processes. For HR and recruiting, a Sequence could manage the entire post-offer process: automatically sending the offer letter, following up with benefits information, scheduling a welcome call, and assigning a task to the hiring manager to prepare the workspace. The ability to pause, resume, and track progress through Sequences ensures no step is missed, providing a structured and reliable approach to complex HR workflows and guaranteeing business continuity in talent management.

Web Form

A Web Form in Keap is a customizable online form designed to capture information from visitors to your website or landing pages. When submitted, the data automatically populates a new or existing Contact Record in Keap, and can trigger automation sequences. For HR and recruiting, Web Forms are crucial for candidate application submissions, resume uploads, event registrations (e.g., career fairs), or internal survey collection. By embedding these forms directly on your career page or within specific job postings, you can standardize data collection, ensure all necessary information is captured upfront, and immediately initiate automated follow-up communications or screening processes, vastly improving efficiency and data quality at the entry point of your talent pipeline.

Email Broadcast

An Email Broadcast in Keap is a one-time email message sent manually or on a scheduled basis to a specific segment of your contacts. Unlike emails sent within an automated sequence, broadcasts are typically used for timely announcements, newsletters, or urgent communications that don’t fit into a pre-defined workflow. HR and recruiting professionals can leverage Email Broadcasts for sharing company-wide updates, announcing new policies, distributing internal newsletters, or communicating with specific pools of candidates about new job openings or company news. This tool ensures that important information reaches the right audience quickly and efficiently, maintaining consistent communication across the organization or within specific talent segments.

Lead Scoring

Lead Scoring is a methodology within Keap that assigns numerical values (points) to contacts based on their engagement with your content and their demographic information. This system helps identify the most engaged and qualified leads or candidates, allowing you to prioritize your outreach efforts. In HR and recruiting, Lead Scoring can be adapted to Candidate Scoring. Points might be awarded for interacting with job postings, downloading career guides, having specific skills listed, or completing assessment forms. Candidates with higher scores can be automatically flagged for recruiter review or moved into an accelerated screening process. This systematic approach ensures that valuable recruiter time is focused on the most promising talent, significantly improving recruitment efficiency and reducing time-to-hire.

Opportunity

An Opportunity in Keap represents a potential sales deal or, in the HR context, a specific job opening or candidate pipeline that requires tracking through a defined process. It allows you to manage the progression of a specific “deal” (e.g., a candidate for a “Senior Marketing Manager” role) through various stages, from initial identification to successful placement. For recruiting teams, each active job requisition can be an Opportunity. Recruiters can move candidates through stages like “Screening,” “Interview,” “Offer Extended,” and “Hired.” This provides a clear, visual pipeline management tool, enabling teams to monitor the status of all open roles, forecast hiring needs, and identify bottlenecks in the recruitment process, bringing sales pipeline rigor to talent acquisition.

Pipeline

The Pipeline in Keap is a visual representation of your Opportunities, organized into distinct stages. It allows you to see all active “deals” (job openings/candidates) and their current status at a glance. Users can drag and drop Opportunities between stages, trigger automation, and update information directly from the pipeline view. For HR and recruiting, the Pipeline is an invaluable tool for managing the entire hiring process. You can customize pipeline stages to mirror your recruitment funnel: “Application Received,” “Phone Screen,” “Hiring Manager Interview,” “Final Interview,” “Offer Extended,” “Hired.” This visual management streamlines the hiring process, improves collaboration among hiring teams, identifies where candidates are getting stuck, and ensures a smooth, predictable flow from application to onboarding.

Custom Field

Custom Fields in Keap allow you to extend the standard contact record by adding specific data points relevant to your unique business needs. These fields can be text inputs, dropdown menus, radio buttons, date pickers, or checkboxes. For HR and recruiting, Custom Fields are essential for capturing highly specific information that isn’t covered by Keap’s default fields. Examples include “Desired Salary,” “Availability Date,” “Visa Sponsorship Required,” “Referral Source,” “Certifications,” or “Performance Review Date.” Properly utilized, custom fields ensure all critical candidate and employee data is housed within Keap, enabling richer segmentation, personalized communication, and comprehensive reporting tailored precisely to your talent management requirements, ensuring data integrity and accessibility.

API Integration

API (Application Programming Interface) Integration in Keap refers to the ability to connect Keap with other software applications, allowing data to be exchanged and workflows to be synchronized automatically. This is typically achieved using tools like Make.com (formerly Integromat) or Zapier. For HR and recruiting, API Integration is transformative. You can connect Keap with your Applicant Tracking System (ATS), HRIS, payroll software, assessment platforms, or even external job boards. This eliminates manual data entry between systems, ensures information is consistent across all platforms, and enables seamless automation of processes like candidate data transfer from an ATS to Keap, or new hire information being pushed to payroll, drastically reducing administrative burden and ensuring data protection.

Campaign Link

A Campaign Link in Keap is a specialized hyperlink embedded within emails or web pages that, when clicked by a contact, not only directs them to a specific URL but also records their action in Keap and can trigger subsequent automation. For HR and recruiting, Campaign Links are powerful engagement trackers. You can use them to measure interest in specific job postings, track who downloads benefits packages, or see which candidates click through to scheduling tools. Clicking a Campaign Link can automatically apply a tag (e.g., “Interested in X Role”), move a candidate to the next stage in a pipeline, or initiate a new follow-up sequence. This provides invaluable insights into candidate behavior and allows for highly responsive and personalized interactions.

Order Form

While primarily associated with sales and commerce, Keap’s Order Forms are versatile and can be adapted for specific HR and recruiting use cases that involve transactions or confirmations. An Order Form allows you to collect payments or secure commitments digitally, with all data feeding directly into Keap. For HR, this might be less about product sales and more about collecting fees for specific certifications, professional development courses, or even managing internal event registrations that have an associated cost. The primary benefit for HR is the ability to securely collect data and process transactions within Keap, triggering automated follow-ups and record updates, ensuring a streamlined process for any HR-related financial or commitment-based interaction.

Internal Form

An Internal Form in Keap is similar to a Web Form but is designed for use by your internal team members to update contact records, log interactions, or trigger specific internal automations. These forms are not publicly accessible and are ideal for standardizing data entry for your staff. For HR and recruiting, Internal Forms are incredibly useful for tasks like: logging interview feedback, documenting employee performance reviews, recording internal transfers, updating employee certifications, or initiating an employee offboarding process. By using Internal Forms, you ensure consistent data capture across your team, maintain data integrity, and can trigger subsequent automations (e.g., sending an offer letter upon a hiring manager’s approval), thereby streamlining complex internal HR processes.

Decision Diamond

The Decision Diamond is a crucial element within Keap’s Campaign Builder that allows for conditional logic in your automation workflows. It acts as a “fork in the road,” enabling different paths to be taken based on specific criteria or contact data. For HR and recruiting, the Decision Diamond is vital for creating intelligent, adaptive automation. For example, after an initial application, a Decision Diamond could check a custom field like “Years of Experience.” If the experience meets a certain threshold, the candidate might be routed to an “Expedited Review” sequence; otherwise, they might enter a “Standard Screening” sequence. This powerful feature ensures that your HR processes are flexible and responsive to individual candidate characteristics, optimizing the entire talent journey and ensuring the right people get the right attention.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Keap CRM Implementation for HR & Recruiting: The Data Protection & Business Continuity Checklist