A Glossary of Key Keap Automation & Campaign Terms for HR & Recruiting Professionals

In the fast-evolving landscape of HR and recruiting, leveraging robust CRM and automation platforms like Keap is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity for competitive advantage. Understanding the core terminology of Keap automation and campaign management is crucial for HR leaders and recruiting professionals aiming to streamline workflows, enhance candidate experiences, and ensure data integrity. This glossary defines key terms, offering practical insights into how these concepts can be applied to optimize your talent acquisition and broader HR operations, ultimately saving valuable time and reducing manual effort.

Keap CRM

Keap CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a comprehensive platform designed to centralize contact data, automate marketing efforts, and manage sales processes. For HR and recruiting professionals, Keap CRM serves as a powerful central database for candidates, employees, and past applicants. It enables highly personalized communication, organized talent pools, and diligent tracking of every interaction. By consolidating candidate profiles, communication history, and application statuses, HR teams can move beyond basic applicant tracking to a more holistic talent relationship management approach, ensuring a robust and engaged talent pipeline. This prevents valuable data from being siloed and allows for strategic, long-term talent nurturing.

Campaign Builder

Keap’s Campaign Builder is an intuitive visual tool that allows users to design and implement automated sequences of actions based on specific triggers or conditions. For HR professionals, this is a game-changer for automating various talent lifecycle stages. It can be used to construct detailed onboarding processes for new hires, create nurturing sequences for passive candidates, or automate follow-ups post-interview. The drag-and-drop interface allows for complex workflows to be built easily, ensuring consistent communication, timely task assignments, and a seamless experience for both candidates and internal teams, reducing the administrative burden on HR staff.

Automation

In the context of Keap, automation refers to the process of setting up predefined actions to occur automatically when specific triggers or conditions are met within the system. For recruiting, this translates into significant time savings and efficiency gains. Examples include sending an automated ‘thank you’ email immediately upon resume submission, scheduling an interview reminder email 24 hours before a scheduled meeting, or assigning a task to a hiring manager when a candidate reaches a specific stage. By automating repetitive tasks, HR teams can focus on strategic initiatives, improving response times and ensuring a professional candidate experience without manual intervention.

Sequence

A sequence within Keap is a carefully ordered series of automated steps—often comprising emails, internal tasks, delays, and conditional logic—designed to guide a contact through a specific journey. HR utilizes sequences extensively for various purposes, such as creating drip campaigns to re-engage passive candidates over time, delivering automated compliance training modules to new hires, or providing a structured post-interview feedback loop. Sequences ensure that contacts receive the right information at the right time, fostering engagement and ensuring all necessary steps are completed systematically, thereby standardizing processes and reducing oversight.

Tagging

Tagging in Keap involves applying specific labels or categories (tags) to contacts based on their attributes, behaviors, or preferences. This powerful segmentation tool allows HR teams to categorize candidates by skill set, interview stage, source (e.g., LinkedIn, referral), desired role, or even preferred communication method. By leveraging tags, HR professionals can execute highly targeted communication strategies, send relevant content to specific candidate segments, and generate precise reports. Effective tagging ensures that every communication is personalized and pertinent, enhancing candidate engagement and optimizing the efficiency of talent pool management.

Lead Score

While traditionally a sales concept, Keap’s lead score functionality assigns a numerical value to a contact based on their engagement with your content and their demographic information, indicating their potential “readiness” for a certain action. HR and recruiting teams can adapt lead scoring to identify highly engaged candidates (e.g., those who frequently visit career pages, open recruitment emails, or download job descriptions) or to pinpoint existing employees ready for promotion or leadership development. This allows for a data-driven approach to talent identification, prioritizing outreach to the most promising individuals and optimizing resource allocation in recruiting efforts.

Webform

A Keap webform is a customizable online form that can be embedded on websites or hosted directly by Keap. It is used to capture contact information, collect data, and, crucially, trigger specific automations. For recruiters, webforms are indispensable for managing various aspects of the candidate journey. They can be embedded on career pages for job applications, used for event registrations (e.g., virtual career fairs), or for talent pool sign-ups, directly feeding valuable data into Keap CRM. This streamlines the initial data collection process, eliminating manual entry and ensuring all new leads are immediately entered into the appropriate automated workflow.

Landing Page

A Keap landing page is a standalone web page specifically designed for marketing or lead generation purposes, often featuring a clear call to action and integrated seamlessly with Keap forms. For HR and recruiting, landing pages are versatile tools. They can be created for specific job openings, to promote upcoming recruitment events, to showcase employer branding initiatives, or to capture interest from specialized talent pools. By focusing a candidate’s attention on a single objective, landing pages enhance conversion rates and provide a focused entry point for candidates into your automated recruitment funnels, delivering a professional and consistent brand experience.

Broadcast

A broadcast in Keap refers to a one-time email or SMS message sent to a selected group of contacts. Unlike automated sequences, broadcasts are ideal for urgent or time-sensitive communications that need to reach a specific segment of employees or candidates quickly. For HR, this could include company-wide announcements about new policies, urgent job fair invitations, critical system updates, or important benefits information. Broadcasts ensure that important messages are delivered efficiently to the right audience, serving as a vital tool for immediate, mass communication without needing to build a complex campaign.

Email Marketing (Keap)

Keap’s email marketing capabilities encompass the tools and features used to send targeted email messages to contacts, nurturing relationships and driving desired actions. HR professionals leverage this for sophisticated candidate nurture campaigns, providing valuable information about company culture or specific roles to passive candidates. It’s also vital for onboarding communications, internal employee engagement newsletters, or even personalized outreach to past applicants. All email interactions are tracked within the CRM, providing valuable insights into engagement levels and informing future communication strategies to build stronger relationships with talent.

Sales Pipeline (Keap)

In Keap, the sales pipeline is a visual representation of the stages a lead or prospect moves through from initial contact to conversion. HR and recruiting teams can effectively adapt this concept to manage their “recruitment pipeline,” tracking candidates from initial application submission through interview stages, offer acceptance, and onboarding. This provides clear, at-a-glance visibility of hiring progress for all open requisitions. By visualizing the talent journey, HR can identify bottlenecks, forecast hiring timelines more accurately, and ensure no candidate falls through the cracks, optimizing the entire recruitment process for efficiency and predictability.

Automation Link

An automation link is a special hyperlink embedded within an email, landing page, or web page that, when clicked by a contact, automatically triggers a specific automation or sequence in Keap. This is an incredibly powerful tool for HR to gauge interest and drive immediate action. For example, a candidate clicking an “Apply Now” automation link can instantly move them to the next stage in the recruitment pipeline, trigger an email confirmation, and assign a follow-up task to a recruiter. Automation links personalize the candidate journey based on their explicit actions, making workflows dynamic and responsive.

Decision Diamond

The Decision Diamond is a conditional element within Keap’s Campaign Builder that allows an automation path to split based on whether a contact meets specific criteria. These criteria could include possessing a certain tag, clicking a specific link, having a particular field value, or even their lead score. HR uses Decision Diamonds to personalize candidate journeys on a deeper level, sending different content or assigning different tasks based on qualifications, application status, or specific interests. This ensures highly relevant interactions, whether it’s directing candidates to different job families or providing tailored pre-interview materials.

Goal

In Keap’s Campaign Builder, a goal represents a specific action or event that, when achieved by a contact, triggers their progression through a campaign or moves them out of a current sequence. For HR, goals are crucial for defining milestones in the candidate or employee journey. Examples include a candidate submitting a job application webform, booking an interview through a scheduling link, completing an onboarding task, or attending a recruitment event. Goals provide clear markers of progress, automating the transition to the next stage of interaction and allowing HR to track key conversion points in their talent acquisition funnels.

Follow-up Campaign

A follow-up campaign in Keap is a meticulously designed series of automated messages and actions intended to maintain engagement and provide further information after an initial interaction. HR teams implement follow-up campaigns after various touchpoints: post-interviews to collect feedback and provide next steps, after career fairs to nurture interested candidates, or even post-hire to ensure ongoing engagement and support for new employees during their initial months. These campaigns are vital for building and maintaining relationships, ensuring candidates feel valued, and reducing drop-off rates throughout the talent acquisition and retention processes.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Ensure Keap Contact Restore Success: A Guide for HR & Recruiting Data Integrity