How to Leverage Keap’s Tagging System to Segment and Prioritize Your Talent Pool Effectively
In today’s competitive talent landscape, effective talent pool management is not just an advantage—it’s a necessity. For HR and recruiting professionals, Keap’s robust tagging system offers a powerful, yet often underutilized, mechanism to transform a static database into a dynamic, prioritized talent pipeline. This guide will walk you through leveraging Keap tags to deeply segment your talent pool, ensuring you connect with the right candidates at the right time, every time. By moving beyond basic contact management, you can unlock unparalleled efficiency and precision in your recruitment efforts, ultimately saving significant time and resources while improving hire quality.
Step 1: Define Your Segmentation Criteria
Before applying any tags, it’s crucial to establish what criteria truly matter for your talent pool. This isn’t just about general roles; it’s about the granular details that differentiate candidates and make them suitable for specific opportunities or future engagement strategies. Consider factors such as specific skill sets (e.g., “Python Developer,” “Project Manager – Agile”), industry experience (“FinTech,” “Healthcare IT”), desired salary range, geographical preference, visa status, source of application (e.g., “LinkedIn,” “Referral,” “Career Fair”), and even their engagement level with your brand. A clear definition of these criteria forms the bedrock of an intelligent and effective tagging strategy within Keap, allowing for truly targeted outreach and improved matching.
Step 2: Develop a Standardized Tagging Taxonomy
Consistency is key to a functional tagging system. Without a standardized taxonomy, your Keap database can quickly become a chaotic mess of duplicate, misspelled, or inconsistently applied tags, rendering the system useless. Establish clear naming conventions (e.g., “Skill::[Skill Name],” “Role::[Role Title],” “Status::[Active/Passive],” “Source::[Channel]”). Document these standards and ensure anyone interacting with your Keap system understands and adheres to them. This might involve creating a master list of approved tags and categories. A well-structured taxonomy ensures that searches are efficient, reporting is accurate, and automation rules function flawlessly, ultimately maximizing the value of your Keap investment.
Step 3: Implement Initial Talent Pool Tagging
With your segmentation criteria defined and taxonomy in place, it’s time to apply tags to your existing talent pool within Keap. This can be done in bulk for segments of contacts that share common attributes, or individually for more nuanced profiles. Start by segmenting your current database based on readily available data points. For instance, if you have a list of candidates from a specific recruitment event, tag them all with “Source::CareerFair-2023.” Systematically work through your contacts, ensuring that each profile is enriched with relevant tags that reflect their professional background, interests, and potential fit for future roles. This foundational tagging is critical for activating your existing database.
Step 4: Automate Tagging for New Influx
The real power of Keap’s tagging system emerges when you automate the process. Set up Keap campaigns or integrate with tools like Make.com to automatically apply tags to new contacts as they enter your talent pool. For example, if a candidate completes a specific form on your careers page for a “Marketing Specialist” role, a tag like “Role::Marketing Specialist” can be automatically applied. Similarly, if they respond to a particular email sequence, their engagement level can be tagged. This proactive, automated tagging reduces manual effort, ensures data accuracy from the outset, and keeps your talent pool segments continuously up-to-date without constant human intervention.
Step 5: Utilize Tags for Targeted Communication & Prioritization
Once your talent pool is robustly tagged, you can harness this segmentation for highly targeted communication and intelligent prioritization. Use Keap’s advanced search and reporting features to filter contacts by specific combinations of tags. For example, you can quickly identify “Skill::SQL” AND “Experience::Senior” candidates who are also “Status::Passive” and located in “Geo::New York.” This level of precision allows you to craft highly relevant email campaigns, send personalized job alerts, or even prioritize outreach to candidates who best match an urgent hiring need. By speaking directly to their specific interests and qualifications, you significantly increase engagement rates and improve the candidate experience.
Step 6: Regularly Review and Refine Your Tagging System
A tagging system is not a set-it-and-forget-it solution; it requires ongoing maintenance and refinement to remain effective. Periodically review your tags to identify any redundancies, outdated labels, or tags that are no longer serving a useful purpose. As your company’s hiring needs evolve or new technologies emerge, your segmentation criteria may also change. Schedule quarterly or bi-annual audits of your Keap tags to ensure they align with your current recruitment strategies. Removing irrelevant tags and introducing new ones as needed keeps your system clean, agile, and continually optimized for peak performance in talent acquisition, reflecting the dynamic nature of your hiring ecosystem.
If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Keap Marketing Automation for HR & Recruiting: Build Your Automated Talent Acquisition Machine
