A Glossary of Database Management and Contact Lifecycle Terms in Keap for HR & Recruiting Professionals
For HR and recruiting professionals, mastering your CRM is not just about managing contacts; it’s about orchestrating the entire candidate journey, from initial outreach to successful onboarding. Keap, a powerful CRM and marketing automation platform, offers robust tools that, when understood and leveraged correctly, can transform your operational efficiency. This glossary demystifies key terms related to database management and contact lifecycles within Keap, helping you automate more effectively and make data-driven decisions that impact your talent acquisition strategies.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, though in the HR and recruiting context, it’s more accurately a Candidate Relationship Management system. Keap serves as a centralized platform where all interactions, data points, and communications with candidates, employees, or clients are stored and managed. For HR and recruiting professionals, a CRM like Keap is critical for tracking candidate progress through various hiring stages, managing applicant pipelines, personalizing communications, and maintaining a comprehensive historical record of all engagements. It helps in nurturing relationships, improving candidate experience, and ensuring no promising lead falls through the cracks, ultimately streamlining the recruitment workflow and enhancing overall talent management.
Contact Record
A Contact Record is the individual profile within Keap that holds all pertinent information about a specific person—a candidate, a client, or an employee. This record encompasses standard details like name, contact information, company, and job title, but can also include custom fields essential for HR and recruiting, such as skills, qualifications, previous roles, interview notes, and application status. Maintaining accurate and detailed contact records is fundamental for effective segmentation, personalized communication, and efficient automation. It acts as the single source of truth for each individual, enabling recruiters to quickly access all necessary information to make informed decisions and tailor their outreach.
Tagging/Tags
Tags are labels you apply to contact records within Keap to categorize them based on specific attributes, behaviors, or statuses. For HR and recruiting, tags are invaluable for segmenting your database. Examples include “Candidate – Software Engineer,” “Interviewed – Round 1,” “Talent Pool – Passive,” or “Onboarded Employee.” Tags allow you to quickly identify specific groups of individuals for targeted communications, automation triggers, or reporting. For instance, you can automatically send a follow-up email to all contacts tagged “Interviewed – Round 1” or pull a list of all “Talent Pool – Passive” candidates for future openings, significantly streamlining candidate management and outreach.
Automation/Campaigns
In Keap, automation refers to predefined sequences of actions that execute automatically based on specific triggers or conditions, often structured within what Keap calls Campaigns. For HR and recruiting, this might involve automatically sending an application confirmation email upon submission, scheduling an interview reminder, or initiating a series of onboarding tasks when a candidate is hired. Campaigns are built visually within Keap and can include email sequences, task assignments, tag application, and more. Leveraging automation reduces manual workload, ensures timely communication, provides consistent candidate experiences, and allows recruiters to focus on high-value interactions rather than repetitive administrative tasks.
Lead Score/Lifecycle Stage
While “Lead Score” typically applies to sales leads, in HR and recruiting, it can be adapted to a “Candidate Score” or used in conjunction with “Lifecycle Stages” to prioritize and manage applicants. Lifecycle Stages in Keap define where a contact is in their journey with your organization (e.g., “Applicant,” “Interviewing,” “Offer Extended,” “Hired,” “Rejected”). A Candidate Score might be assigned based on qualifications, experience, or engagement levels, helping recruiters identify top talent quickly. Combined, these mechanisms allow HR teams to visually track progress, trigger specific automations (like sending offer letters), and focus attention on candidates most likely to succeed, optimizing the recruitment pipeline.
Custom Fields
Custom Fields are additional data fields you create in Keap beyond the standard contact information to capture specific details relevant to your business needs. For HR and recruiting, these are crucial for storing specialized candidate data that isn’t covered by Keap’s default fields. Examples include “Desired Salary,” “Visa Status,” “Years of Experience,” “Portfolio URL,” or “Referral Source.” By customizing these fields, you can maintain a richer, more tailored candidate profile, which in turn enables more precise segmentation, personalized communication, and data-driven decision-making throughout the hiring process. This ensures your database truly serves your unique talent acquisition strategy.
Data Hygiene
Data Hygiene refers to the practice of maintaining a clean, accurate, and up-to-date database within Keap. For HR and recruiting professionals, this involves regularly removing duplicate contact records, updating outdated information (e.g., changed email addresses or phone numbers), archiving inactive candidates, and ensuring consistency in data entry. Poor data hygiene leads to inefficiencies, inaccurate reporting, wasted resources on bounced emails, and a diminished candidate experience. Implementing regular data hygiene practices ensures your Keap database remains a reliable asset, supporting effective automation, precise communication, and compliant data management, critical for both operational efficiency and legal adherence.
API (Application Programming Interface) / Integration
An API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of rules that allows different software applications to communicate and share data with each other. In the context of Keap, an API enables seamless Integration with other HR tech tools such as applicant tracking systems (ATS), HRIS platforms, or assessment tools. For example, a candidate applying through an ATS could automatically have their data transferred to Keap via API, triggering an automation sequence. These integrations eliminate manual data entry, reduce errors, and create a more cohesive technology ecosystem, which is vital for HR and recruiting teams managing complex workflows across multiple systems, enhancing efficiency and data flow.
Webhook
A Webhook is an automated message sent from an app when a specific event occurs, essentially a “user-defined HTTP callback.” In Keap, webhooks can be used to send real-time data to other applications when certain actions happen, such as a tag being applied, a form being submitted, or a contact reaching a specific stage in a campaign. For HR and recruiting, a webhook might notify an external task management system when a candidate accepts an offer, or trigger an action in an HRIS when a new employee record is created in Keap. Webhooks are powerful for creating highly responsive, real-time automations that span across different platforms, connecting your Keap data to virtually any other system.
GDPR/CCPA/Data Privacy
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) are critical data privacy laws that dictate how organizations must collect, process, and store personal data. For HR and recruiting professionals using Keap, this means ensuring compliance in managing candidate and employee data. This includes obtaining explicit consent for data collection, providing transparency on data usage, enabling individuals to access or delete their data, and safeguarding data against breaches. Keap offers features to help manage opt-ins/opt-outs and data access requests, but understanding these regulations is paramount to avoid legal penalties, build trust with candidates, and protect your organization’s reputation. Compliance is not just a legal obligation but a cornerstone of ethical data management.
Merge Fields/Personalization
Merge Fields (sometimes called custom fields or personalization fields) are placeholders in your Keap emails, texts, or documents that automatically pull specific data from a contact’s record and insert it into the communication. For HR and recruiting, this allows for highly personalized outreach, such as addressing candidates by their first name, referencing their specific application, or mentioning their desired role. Instead of “Dear Applicant,” you can say “Dear [First Name],” and mention “regarding your application for the [Job Title] position.” Personalization dramatically improves engagement rates, enhances the candidate experience, and makes communications feel more human and less automated, which is crucial in competitive talent markets.
Pipeline Management
Pipeline Management, in Keap for HR and recruiting, refers to the systematic process of tracking and guiding candidates through various stages of the hiring process. Keap’s opportunities feature, or even custom fields and tags, can be configured to represent a recruitment pipeline (e.g., “Application Received,” “Phone Screen,” “On-Site Interview,” “Offer Extended,” “Hired”). Effective pipeline management allows recruiters to visualize their candidate flow, identify bottlenecks, forecast hiring needs, and ensure no candidate stagnates or is forgotten. This structured approach helps maintain momentum, optimizes resource allocation, and improves overall time-to-hire, leading to a more efficient and predictable talent acquisition process.
Follow-up Sequence
A Follow-up Sequence is an automated series of communications (emails, texts, tasks) designed to nurture candidates or prompt specific actions over a period of time. In Keap, these are often built as part of an automation campaign. For HR and recruiting, a follow-up sequence might involve sending a series of emails to candidates after an initial interview, providing updates on their application status, or offering valuable content related to the company culture. It can also be used to re-engage passive candidates over time. Consistent follow-ups enhance candidate experience, keep your organization top-of-mind, and can significantly improve conversion rates from applicant to hire by maintaining engagement.
Opt-in/Opt-out Management
Opt-in/Opt-out Management refers to the process of obtaining and tracking explicit consent from individuals to receive communications, and respecting their choices to unsubscribe. In Keap, this is crucial for maintaining compliance with anti-spam laws like CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CCPA. For HR and recruiting, ensuring candidates and contacts have clearly opted-in to receive recruitment updates or newsletters is vital. Providing clear opt-out mechanisms (e.g., an unsubscribe link in emails) is equally important. Proper management protects your organization from legal issues, maintains a healthy email sender reputation, and ensures you are only communicating with individuals who wish to hear from you, fostering trust and professional relationships.
Database Backup/Recovery
Database Backup/Recovery refers to the process of creating copies of your Keap data to ensure it can be restored in the event of data loss, corruption, or system failure. While Keap has its own robust infrastructure, external backup strategies are often recommended for critical business data, especially for HR and recruiting where candidate and employee information is highly sensitive and essential for continuity. Implementing solutions that regularly back up Keap data (e.g., via API to a separate data warehouse) provides a crucial layer of security and peace of mind. A solid recovery plan ensures that even in unforeseen circumstances, your valuable talent data and operational history can be quickly restored, preventing significant business disruption.
If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Critical Keap Data Recovery for HR & Recruiting Business Continuity
