A Glossary of Essential HighLevel Contact Management Terminology for HR & Recruiting Professionals

In today’s fast-paced HR and recruiting landscape, leveraging robust CRM platforms like HighLevel is crucial for managing candidate relationships and automating talent acquisition processes. Understanding the core terminology of HighLevel contact management is fundamental to maximizing its potential. This glossary provides HR and recruiting professionals with clear, actionable definitions of key terms, illustrating how they can be applied to streamline operations, enhance candidate experiences, and improve hiring outcomes.

Contact Record

A contact record in HighLevel serves as the central repository for all information pertaining to an individual candidate or client. It includes essential data such as name, contact details, communication history, and custom field values. For HR and recruiting professionals, a well-maintained contact record is vital for tracking a candidate’s journey from initial application through hiring and onboarding. Automation in HighLevel allows for new contact records to be automatically created from job applications, web forms, or imported lists, ensuring no lead is ever lost and all relevant data is immediately accessible for follow-up and segmentation.

Custom Fields

Custom fields are user-defined data fields that extend the standard information captured in a contact record. They allow HR and recruiting teams to store specific data points relevant to their unique hiring processes, such as “Desired Salary,” “Years of Experience,” “Skills Keywords,” or “Current Employment Status.” Properly configured custom fields are invaluable for advanced candidate segmentation, personalized communication, and ensuring that automated workflows (e.g., skill-based screening or role-specific outreach) are triggered by the most relevant candidate data, enhancing the precision of your talent acquisition efforts.

Smart Lists

Smart Lists are dynamic contact lists that automatically update based on predefined criteria, combining the power of tags, custom fields, and other contact data. Instead of static lists, Smart Lists continuously reflect changes in contact information or status. An HR professional might create a Smart List for “Candidates for [Job Role] with ‘Active’ Status” or “Sales Professionals in [Industry] who haven’t been contacted in 30 days.” These lists are critical for maintaining an organized talent pool, ensuring timely follow-ups, and initiating highly targeted outreach campaigns driven by real-time data, thereby optimizing recruiter efficiency.

Workflows (Automations)

Workflows, often referred to as automations in HighLevel, are sequences of automated steps triggered by specific events. They are the backbone of efficiency in HighLevel, allowing HR teams to automate repetitive tasks and candidate journeys. Examples include automatically sending a confirmation email after an application, scheduling an initial screening call based on resume keywords, moving a candidate to a “Hired” pipeline stage, or triggering internal notifications for recruiters. Effective workflows ensure consistency, reduce manual effort, and improve response times in the talent acquisition process, leading to a smoother candidate experience.

Campaigns

In HighLevel, campaigns are a series of timed, automated messages (SMS, email, voicemail) designed to nurture leads or candidates over a specific period. While similar to workflows, campaigns often focus on drip-feed communication sequences. An HR team might use a campaign to send a series of onboarding documents to new hires, provide regular updates to passive candidates about upcoming roles, or re-engage past applicants. Campaigns help maintain consistent communication, build rapport, and ensure that important information is delivered systematically without manual intervention, fostering stronger candidate relationships.

Opportunities

An opportunity in HighLevel represents a specific potential engagement or progression with a contact, typically used to track a candidate through a hiring pipeline. Each opportunity is associated with a contact and can be moved through different stages of a defined pipeline. For recruiting, an “opportunity” could be a candidate’s application for a specific job, progressing from “Application Received” to “Interview Scheduled,” “Offer Extended,” and “Hired.” Opportunities provide a clear visual tracking mechanism for managing multiple candidates across various roles, simplifying complex recruitment projects.

Pipelines

Pipelines are visual representations of the stages that opportunities move through in HighLevel. They provide a structured framework for managing the progression of candidates through the recruitment lifecycle. A typical recruiting pipeline might include stages like “New Applicant,” “Resume Review,” “Phone Screen,” “Interview,” “Reference Check,” “Offer,” and “Hired.” By configuring custom pipelines, HR and recruiting teams gain a holistic view of their talent funnel, identify bottlenecks, and ensure a standardized process for all candidate engagements, leading to more predictable hiring cycles.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is the core system HighLevel provides for managing interactions and relationships with current and prospective customers—or in the context of HR and recruiting, candidates and clients. A CRM system helps organizations stay connected to contacts, streamline processes, and improve profitability. For HR, a CRM like HighLevel centralizes candidate data, automates communications, tracks application statuses, and provides tools for nurturing talent relationships over time, acting as a crucial talent relationship management system that enhances efficiency and engagement.

Triggers

Triggers are specific events or conditions that initiate an automation (workflow) within HighLevel. They are the “if this happens” part of an automation rule. Examples of triggers relevant to HR include “Form Submitted” (e.g., a job application), “Tag Added” (e.g., “Interview Scheduled”), “Contact Created,” “Opportunity Status Changed,” or “Email Opened.” Selecting the correct trigger is essential for designing effective automations that respond appropriately and instantaneously to candidate actions or internal process updates, minimizing delays and manual oversight in your recruitment process.

Actions

Actions are the automated steps performed by a HighLevel workflow once a trigger has been met. They are the “then do this” part of an automation rule. Common actions in an HR context include “Send Email,” “Send SMS,” “Add Tag,” “Update Custom Field,” “Move Opportunity,” “Create Task,” “Add to Campaign,” or “Notify User.” By combining various actions, HR professionals can construct sophisticated automations that handle everything from initial candidate acknowledgments to interview scheduling and post-hire follow-ups, ensuring a seamless and efficient candidate experience while reducing administrative burden.

Integrations

Integrations refer to the ability of HighLevel to connect and exchange data with other third-party software and platforms. This capability is vital for creating a truly unified HR tech stack. For instance, HighLevel can integrate with job boards, HRIS systems, calendar applications, or background check services using native connectors or tools like Make.com. Seamless integrations prevent data silos, reduce duplicate data entry, and enable end-to-end automation of the recruiting and onboarding processes, enhancing overall operational efficiency and providing a single source of truth for candidate data.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a methodology used to assign a numerical value (score) to a contact based on their engagement, demographics, and behaviors. In HR, this translates to candidate scoring, where attributes like experience level, skills, interactions with job postings, or responses to recruitment emails contribute to a candidate’s score. High-scoring candidates are typically more qualified or engaged. HighLevel can automate lead scoring through workflows, helping recruiters prioritize their outreach and focus on candidates who are most likely to be a good fit, thereby optimizing recruitment efforts and improving conversion rates.

Communication Channels (SMS, Email, Voicemail)

HighLevel provides integrated tools to communicate with contacts across various channels directly from the platform. These include SMS (text messaging), email, and even automated voicemail drops. For HR and recruiting, leveraging these channels effectively is key to engaging candidates. SMS can be used for quick updates or interview reminders, email for detailed communications like job descriptions or offer letters, and voicemail drops for personal touches without requiring a live conversation. This multi-channel approach ensures consistent, timely, and preferred communication with candidates, enhancing the overall candidate experience.

Reporting & Analytics

HighLevel’s reporting and analytics features provide insights into the performance of contact management activities, campaigns, pipelines, and overall recruitment efforts. These tools allow HR and recruiting professionals to track key metrics such as candidate conversion rates, pipeline velocity, communication engagement rates, and lead source effectiveness. By analyzing this data, teams can identify areas for improvement, optimize their recruitment strategies, and make data-driven decisions to enhance efficiency and achieve better hiring outcomes, ensuring continuous improvement in talent acquisition.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Comprehensive HighLevel Data Protection & Instant Recovery for HR & Recruiting

By Jeff ArnoldPublished On: November 10, 2025