A Glossary of Key Keap Platform Terminology for Recruiters

Navigating any new platform requires understanding its core language, and Keap is no exception. For HR and recruiting professionals looking to harness the power of automation to streamline talent acquisition, a solid grasp of Keap’s terminology is essential. This glossary is designed to demystify the key terms you’ll encounter, providing clear, authoritative definitions tailored to how these features can transform your hiring processes and candidate engagement strategies. By understanding these concepts, you’ll be better equipped to design efficient workflows, enhance candidate experiences, and ultimately save invaluable time and resources.

Contact Record

In Keap, a Contact Record is the foundational element for every individual or company you interact with. Each record stores comprehensive information such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and any custom data fields you define. For recruiters, the Contact Record is where all candidate information resides, from their initial application details to interview notes, skill sets, and communication history. Maintaining accurate and detailed contact records is critical for effective candidate management, allowing recruiters to segment their talent pool, personalize outreach, and track individual progress through the hiring pipeline, ensuring no promising candidate slips through the cracks.

Tag

A Tag in Keap is a powerful labeling system used to categorize and segment your contact records. It’s a flexible identifier that can represent anything from a candidate’s skill (e.g., “Java Developer,” “Marketing Specialist”), their stage in the hiring process (“Initial Application,” “Interviewed,” “Offer Extended”), or specific interests (“Remote Work,” “Project Management”). Recruiters leverage tags extensively to build dynamic candidate lists, trigger automated campaigns based on specific criteria, and quickly filter their database to find the perfect match for a new role. Proper tagging is fundamental for creating personalized candidate journeys and optimizing automation efficiency.

Campaign

A Keap Campaign is a strategic, automated sequence of actions designed to achieve a specific business objective. For recruiting, a campaign might onboard new hires, nurture passive candidates, or manage event registrations. These multi-step workflows can include sending emails, internal notifications, assigning tasks, updating contact fields, and applying tags. Recruiters use campaigns to automate repetitive communications, ensuring consistent follow-up with applicants, scheduling interview reminders, or delivering pre-onboarding materials. Campaigns are the backbone of a robust automation strategy, allowing HR teams to provide timely, personalized interactions at scale without manual intervention.

Sequence

Within Keap’s Campaign Builder, a Sequence represents a specific series of automated steps that contacts move through. While a Campaign is the overarching strategy, a Sequence is a modular block of actions—such as sending a drip series of emails, applying a delay, or triggering an internal task—that executes particular parts of that strategy. Recruiters might create sequences for “New Applicant Welcome,” “Post-Interview Follow-Up,” or “Passive Candidate Nurture.” Contacts can be added to and removed from sequences based on their actions (e.g., opening an email, submitting a form), allowing for dynamic and responsive candidate engagement.

Automation

In the context of Keap, Automation refers to the system’s ability to perform actions automatically based on predefined triggers and conditions. This can range from simple tasks like sending a welcome email when a new contact is added, to complex workflows involving conditional logic and integrations with other systems. For recruiting, automation is transformative: it handles initial applicant screening, sends automated follow-ups, schedules interviews, updates candidate statuses, and even flags critical information for human review. Implementing automation frees up recruiters from tedious, manual work, allowing them to focus on high-value activities like candidate engagement and strategic talent acquisition.

Pipeline / Opportunity

Keap’s Pipeline (often associated with Opportunities) is a visual representation of a multi-stage process, typically used for sales but highly adaptable for recruiting. Each stage in a recruiting pipeline could represent a step in the hiring process: “Application Received,” “Screening,” “First Interview,” “Assessment,” “Offer Extended,” “Hired.” An Opportunity is a specific candidate moving through this pipeline. Recruiters use pipelines to track the progress of each candidate, identify bottlenecks, forecast hiring needs, and ensure a consistent process for every role. This visual management tool provides clarity and control over the entire talent acquisition lifecycle.

Webform

A Keap Webform is an online form used to capture information from website visitors or candidates. These forms can be embedded on your website, used as standalone landing pages, or linked directly in emails. For HR and recruiting, webforms are essential for collecting job applications, event registrations (like career fairs), interest inquiries, or feedback. When a candidate submits a webform, their information automatically creates or updates a contact record in Keap, and can trigger subsequent automations, such as sending a confirmation email or adding them to a specific nurturing campaign.

Landing Page

A Keap Landing Page is a standalone web page designed with a specific goal, often to convert visitors into leads or applicants by presenting focused content and a clear call to action (typically a webform). Unlike general website pages, landing pages remove navigation and distractions to keep the visitor focused on the conversion goal. Recruiters can use landing pages for specific job postings, to promote a career event, or to build a talent pool for future openings. Integrating seamlessly with Keap’s automation, submissions on these pages can directly initiate targeted candidate journeys.

Broadcast

A Keap Broadcast is a one-time, mass communication sent to a specific segment of your contacts. Unlike emails within an automated campaign, broadcasts are sent manually for immediate, non-sequential messaging. Recruiters might use broadcasts to announce a new job opening to a talent pool, invite candidates to a virtual career fair, send urgent updates about an application, or share general company news with prospects. Broadcasts are an efficient way to disseminate important information quickly to a large, targeted audience without triggering complex automated workflows.

Merge Fields

Merge Fields (also known as custom fields or personalization fields) in Keap are placeholders in your email templates, text messages, or internal notes that automatically populate with specific data from a contact’s record. For example, `{Contact.FirstName}` will automatically insert the contact’s first name. Recruiters heavily rely on merge fields to personalize communication with candidates, making emails feel individual and engaging rather than generic. This personalization improves open rates, builds rapport, and enhances the candidate experience, whether it’s for an initial outreach or a follow-up after an interview.

Custom Fields

Beyond the standard fields (like name, email, phone number), Keap allows you to create Custom Fields to store specific data points relevant to your business needs. For recruiters, custom fields are invaluable for capturing specialized candidate information not covered by default fields. Examples include “Desired Salary,” “Years of Experience,” “Portfolio Link,” “Visa Status,” or “Referral Source.” These fields enable highly granular segmentation, advanced automation logic, and comprehensive reporting, ensuring that every piece of relevant candidate data is tracked and accessible for informed hiring decisions.

Integration

An Integration in Keap refers to the connection and data exchange between Keap and other software applications. This connectivity allows different systems to work together seamlessly, eliminating manual data entry and improving workflow efficiency. For HR and recruiting, common integrations include connecting Keap with applicant tracking systems (ATS), calendaring tools for interview scheduling, video conferencing platforms, or HRIS systems for onboarding. Strategic integrations are crucial for creating a unified talent acquisition ecosystem, ensuring smooth data flow and eliminating bottlenecks between various recruiting tools.

Reporting

Keap’s Reporting features provide data and analytics on the performance of your campaigns, sales pipelines, and overall contact engagement. For recruiters, reporting is vital for measuring the effectiveness of their talent acquisition strategies. You can track metrics such as campaign open rates, click-through rates, lead scores, candidate conversion rates through the pipeline, and the overall health of your talent pool. Robust reporting enables HR professionals to identify successful strategies, pinpoint areas for improvement, optimize their automation, and demonstrate the ROI of their recruiting efforts.

Lead Score

Lead Scoring in Keap is a system that assigns numerical values (scores) to contacts based on their engagement and demographic information, indicating their level of interest or qualification. For recruiters, this translates to Candidate Scoring. Actions like visiting a careers page, opening job alert emails, downloading a company culture guide, or possessing specific skills might increase a candidate’s score. This helps recruiters prioritize their outreach and focus on the most engaged and qualified applicants, ensuring that valuable time is spent on candidates most likely to convert into hires, thereby optimizing recruiting efficiency.

API (Application Programming Interface)

An API (Application Programming Interface) in Keap is a set of rules and protocols that allows external software applications to communicate and interact with Keap’s data and functionalities. It acts as a bridge, enabling custom integrations that go beyond standard connections. For recruiting, leveraging Keap’s API means building highly specialized integrations with proprietary ATS systems, custom assessment platforms, or advanced HR analytics tools. While requiring technical expertise, the API offers unparalleled flexibility to tailor Keap’s capabilities precisely to unique recruiting workflows, unlocking advanced automation and data synchronization possibilities.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: The Automated Recruiter: Your Blueprint for Transforming Talent Acquisition with Keap & AI