A Glossary of Key Terms in Keap Automation and Tagging for HR
For HR and recruiting professionals, navigating the landscape of modern talent acquisition demands efficiency, precision, and personalized engagement. Keap, a powerful CRM and automation platform, offers immense potential to streamline these processes. This glossary defines essential terms related to Keap automation and tagging, tailored specifically for HR leaders and recruiters looking to optimize their workflows, reduce administrative burden, and elevate the candidate experience. Understanding these concepts is the first step towards building a truly automated and intelligent recruitment strategy.
Keap CRM
Keap CRM serves as a foundational platform for centralizing and managing customer and, crucially for HR, candidate data. For recruiting professionals, it transforms into a robust system for tracking applicants through various stages, storing communication histories, and managing tasks related to the hiring process. It provides a unified view of every potential hire, enabling HR teams to personalize interactions and ensure no candidate falls through the cracks, making it an indispensable tool for efficient talent acquisition.
Automation (in Keap)
Within Keap, automation refers to the power to execute predefined actions automatically based on specific triggers. For HR and recruiting, this translates into significant time savings and improved candidate experiences. Examples include automatically sending initial confirmation emails upon application submission, assigning follow-up tasks to recruiters when a candidate reaches a new interview stage, or updating a candidate’s status based on their interaction with recruitment emails. This proactive management ensures consistency and allows HR professionals to focus on strategic interactions rather than repetitive administrative tasks.
Tagging (Keap Tags)
Keap tags are versatile labels used to categorize contacts, providing a powerful segmentation tool. In an HR context, tags are indispensable for organizing vast pools of candidates. Recruiters can apply tags to denote specific skill sets, industry experience, application sources (e.g., “LinkedIn”, “Referral”), interview stages (“Interviewed – Round 1”), or even preferred job locations. This granular segmentation enables highly targeted communication campaigns, such as sending specific job alerts to candidates with a particular skill or filtering talent pools for rapid candidate shortlisting, streamlining the recruitment workflow.
Campaigns (Keap Campaigns)
Keap Campaigns are comprehensive, multi-step automated processes designed to guide contacts through a defined journey. For HR and recruiting, a campaign can meticulously manage the entire candidate lifecycle, from initial interest to successful onboarding. This could involve an automated sequence of emails providing company culture insights, reminders for interview scheduling, collection of necessary pre-employment documents, or a drip series introducing new hires to company policies. Campaigns ensure a consistent, professional, and engaging experience for candidates, drastically reducing manual oversight and ensuring crucial steps are never missed.
Sequences
Within Keap campaigns, sequences are a linear series of automated communications or tasks, typically delivered over time. For HR professionals, sequences are invaluable for nurturing candidates and managing specific phases of the recruitment process with precision. This might include a pre-interview sequence providing preparation tips, a post-interview follow-up sequence gathering feedback, or an onboarding sequence delivering staggered information to new hires. Sequences ensure timely and relevant communication, maintaining candidate engagement and ensuring all necessary information is disseminated efficiently and without manual effort.
Forms (Keap Forms)
Keap Forms are customizable web-based tools designed for gathering information directly into your CRM. In the HR and recruiting landscape, these forms are highly versatile. They can serve as primary job application portals, candidate feedback surveys, event registration forms for career fairs, or internal requests for new hire information. When a form is submitted, the data immediately populates the candidate’s Keap record and can trigger subsequent automations, such as sending a confirmation email, applying specific tags, or initiating an interview scheduling sequence, thereby streamlining data collection and process initiation.
Lead Scoring
While traditionally used in sales, the concept of “Lead Scoring” in Keap translates powerfully to “Candidate Scoring” for HR and recruiting. It involves assigning numerical values to candidates based on their qualifications, experience, interactions, and engagement with recruitment content. For instance, a candidate might gain points for specific skills mentioned on a resume, for clicking links in a job alert email, or for engaging with company content. This system allows recruiters to objectively prioritize and identify the most promising candidates, helping them focus their efforts on top-tier talent and significantly shortening time-to-hire by optimizing the candidate selection process.
API Integration (Application Programming Interface)
An API is a set of rules that allows different software applications to communicate and exchange data. For HR and recruiting professionals leveraging Keap, robust API integration is paramount for building a seamless tech stack. It enables Keap to ‘talk’ to other critical systems such as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), HR Information Systems (HRIS), background check services, assessment platforms, or even external job boards. This connectivity eliminates manual data entry, reduces errors, and ensures that candidate information is consistent and up-to-date across all platforms, fostering a truly integrated and efficient recruitment ecosystem.
Webhooks
Webhooks are automated messages or data payloads sent from one application to another in real-time when a specific event occurs. In the context of HR and Keap automation, webhooks act as powerful bridge connectors. For example, a webhook could be triggered when a candidate submits an application on a third-party job board, instantly sending that data to Keap to create a new contact record and initiate an automated follow-up campaign. Similarly, an event in an external calendar app (like an interview being scheduled) could trigger a webhook to update a candidate’s status in Keap, ensuring dynamic and immediate data synchronization.
CRM Automation
CRM automation refers to the implementation of automated processes within a Customer Relationship Management system, extending its benefits beyond traditional sales and marketing. For HR and recruiting, CRM automation within Keap means streamlining repetitive administrative tasks inherent in talent acquisition. This includes automating candidate data entry from forms, scheduling follow-up communications, sending personalized outreach emails at scale, and automatically updating candidate statuses as they progress through the pipeline. By minimizing manual intervention, recruiters can dedicate more time to interviewing, building relationships, and making strategic hiring decisions, significantly enhancing efficiency and reducing operational costs.
Contact Record
In Keap, a Contact Record is a comprehensive, centralized profile for each individual, serving as the single source of truth for all interactions and data. For HR and recruiting, a candidate’s contact record is a critical repository, meticulously storing their application details, resume, communication history (emails, notes, calls), interview feedback, assigned tags, custom field data (e.g., desired salary, visa status), and their current stage within the hiring pipeline. This detailed record empowers recruiters with all necessary information at their fingertips, enabling informed decisions and highly personalized candidate engagement throughout the entire recruitment journey.
Custom Fields
Custom Fields in Keap allow users to create and define additional data fields beyond the standard contact information, tailoring the CRM to specific business needs. For HR and recruiting professionals, custom fields are indispensable for capturing granular candidate-specific data crucial for effective talent management. Examples include “Years of Experience,” “Industry Expertise,” “Visa Sponsorship Required,” “Expected Start Date,” or “Recruiter Assigned.” These bespoke fields enable highly specific candidate searches, precise segmentation for targeted outreach, and comprehensive reporting, ensuring that all relevant data points are collected and easily accessible for strategic hiring decisions and compliance tracking.
Email Broadcasts
Email broadcasts in Keap are one-time email communications sent to a specific, segmented group of contacts. For HR and recruiting, broadcasts are a powerful tool for mass communication that needs to reach a targeted audience quickly. This could involve announcing a new, urgent job opening to a talent pool with relevant skills, sending company news to a segment of passive candidates, inviting specific applicants to a recruitment event, or providing important updates to all active candidates in a particular hiring stage. Broadcasts facilitate efficient, wide-reaching communication while maintaining the ability to target messages appropriately.
Workflow Automation (Broader Context)
While Keap offers robust internal automation, “Workflow Automation” in a broader HR context refers to designing and implementing end-to-end automated processes that often span multiple integrated systems. For recruiting, this could involve automatically parsing resumes from various sources (via tools like Make.com), enriching candidate profiles with AI, scheduling interviews through calendar integrations, generating offer letters via document automation platforms, and initiating onboarding sequences in an HRIS. This holistic approach connects disparate tools and eliminates manual handoffs across the entire talent acquisition and management lifecycle, driving unparalleled efficiency and reducing human error.
Segmentation
Segmentation is the process of dividing a larger database of contacts into smaller, more manageable groups based on shared attributes or behaviors. For HR and recruiting, effective candidate segmentation within Keap is paramount for targeted and personalized engagement. By using a combination of tags, custom fields, and engagement data, recruiters can segment candidates by criteria such as job function, skill set, geographic location, career level, source of application, or even their engagement level with previous communications. This allows for highly relevant outreach, tailored job alerts, and specific nurturing campaigns, maximizing recruitment effectiveness and candidate experience.
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