A Glossary of Key Terms in Customer Lifecycle Management & Keap for HR & Recruiting

In the fast-paced worlds of HR and recruiting, efficient management of candidates and employees is paramount. Understanding the stages of a contact’s journey—from initial lead to long-term employee or client—and how to manage this within a robust CRM like Keap is critical for scalability and success. This glossary defines essential terms, offering a clear guide to navigating customer lifecycle management and contact statuses, specifically tailored for HR and recruiting professionals leveraging automation.

Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM)

Customer Lifecycle Management, or CLM, is a strategic approach to tracking and optimizing every interaction a business has with its customers throughout their entire journey. In HR and recruiting, CLM extends to Contact Lifecycle Management, encompassing a candidate’s journey from initial application, through the hiring process, onboarding, employment, and even offboarding or alumni relations. Utilizing a system like Keap, HR professionals can automate communication, track progress, and ensure a consistent, positive experience for all contacts, reducing manual oversight and improving efficiency. CLM helps identify bottlenecks, personalize engagement, and ultimately, build stronger, more lasting relationships.

Contact Status (in Keap)

Contact Status in Keap refers to a predefined field that indicates the current stage or relationship a contact has with your organization. Examples include “Lead,” “Prospect,” “Customer,” “Applicant,” “Employee,” or “Past Customer.” This status is crucial for segmenting your database and triggering automated actions. For HR, a contact’s status might transition from “Applicant” to “Interview Scheduled,” then to “Offer Extended,” “Hired,” and finally “Active Employee.” Correctly setting and updating statuses via automation ensures that contacts receive relevant communications and that teams have an accurate overview of their pipeline and workforce.

Lead

A Lead is an individual or organization that has shown some initial interest in your company’s offerings, but has not yet been qualified as a potential applicant or client. In HR, a lead might be someone who downloaded a recruitment brochure, attended a career fair, or submitted an initial inquiry. Leads are typically at the top of the funnel, requiring nurturing to ascertain their suitability and interest. Keap can be used to capture lead information, initiate introductory email sequences, and track their engagement, helping recruiters move promising candidates toward the next stage of the hiring process.

Prospect

A Prospect is a qualified lead who has demonstrated a higher level of interest and meets some initial criteria to become an applicant or client. They are actively considering your opportunities. In recruiting, a prospect might be a candidate whose resume has been reviewed and deemed a good fit for a specific role, or someone who has engaged significantly with your employer branding content. Keap campaigns can be designed to further engage prospects, providing more detailed information about roles, company culture, and next steps, moving them closer to submitting a formal application or scheduling an interview.

Applicant

An Applicant is an individual who has formally applied for a specific job opening within your organization. This signifies a clear intent to be considered for employment. For HR and recruiting teams, managing applicants efficiently is critical. Keap can automate the acknowledgment of application receipt, schedule initial screening calls, and update the applicant’s status as they progress through the interview stages. Integrating Keap with an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) can streamline data flow, ensuring all communication and documentation are centralized and accessible.

Candidate

A Candidate is an applicant who has moved beyond the initial screening and is actively being considered for a position. They are typically engaged in interviews, assessments, or other selection processes. The “candidate” status implies a more invested relationship and often requires more personalized and frequent communication. Keap campaigns can be tailored to provide candidates with interview preparation materials, logistical details, and timely updates, ensuring a positive candidate experience and maintaining engagement throughout the often-lengthy hiring process.

Employee Onboarding

Employee Onboarding is the process of integrating new hires into an organization, its culture, and their new role. This goes beyond just paperwork, aiming to make new employees feel welcomed, informed, and productive quickly. Automation in Keap can be invaluable here, triggering welcome emails, assigning training modules, sending reminders for HR forms, and scheduling check-ins with managers. A well-designed onboarding process reduces turnover, increases job satisfaction, and accelerates time-to-productivity for new hires.

Employee Offboarding

Employee Offboarding is the structured process of managing an employee’s departure from the organization, whether due to resignation, retirement, or termination. This includes administrative tasks like final pay, benefits reconciliation, and equipment return, as well as crucial elements like exit interviews and knowledge transfer. Keap can automate many offboarding tasks, creating checklists for HR and managers, sending surveys, and ensuring all necessary steps are completed systematically. An organized offboarding process protects company assets and intellectual property, and maintains a positive employer brand.

Keap Tagging

Keap Tagging is a powerful feature that allows users to categorize contacts with specific labels based on their interests, actions, demographics, or stage in a process. Unlike statuses, which typically represent a single stage, contacts can have multiple tags simultaneously. For HR and recruiting, tags can denote skills (“SQL Developer”), experience levels (“Senior”), event attendance (“Career Fair 2024”), or specific program participation (“Mentorship Program”). Tags are instrumental for precise segmentation, triggering targeted automations, and personalizing communication, enabling highly relevant outreach to different groups of candidates or employees.

Keap Campaign

A Keap Campaign is a series of automated actions and communications designed to guide contacts through a specific journey. Campaigns can include email sequences, SMS messages, task assignments, status updates, and tag application, all triggered by a contact’s behavior or specific dates. In HR, a campaign might be an applicant nurturing sequence, an onboarding flow for new hires, or a re-engagement strategy for past employees. Keap campaigns significantly reduce manual effort, ensure consistent communication, and provide a scalable framework for managing diverse contact lifecycles.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, a technology used to manage all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is to improve business relationships to grow your business. In HR and recruiting, a CRM like Keap is adapted to manage candidate, employee, and client relationships. It centralizes contact data, automates communication, tracks engagement, and provides insights into the entire talent lifecycle, from sourcing and hiring to retention and alumni engagement. A robust CRM helps recruiting teams build talent pipelines, nurture relationships, and streamline hiring processes.

Segmentation

Segmentation is the process of dividing a broad audience (like all your contacts in Keap) into smaller groups based on shared characteristics, behaviors, or preferences. In HR and recruiting, segmentation allows professionals to target specific groups of candidates or employees with highly relevant messages or processes. For example, you might segment candidates by skill set, location, experience level, or application status. This enables personalized communication, more efficient talent pooling, and the delivery of specific content or opportunities that resonate with each group, leading to higher engagement and better outcomes.

Automation

Automation in the context of HR and recruiting refers to the use of technology to perform repetitive tasks without manual intervention, saving time and reducing human error. This can include anything from sending automated interview invitations, updating contact statuses, or triggering onboarding workflows. With tools like Keap and Make.com, HR professionals can automate communication at every stage of the candidate and employee lifecycle, manage data synchronization, and streamline administrative tasks. The ultimate goal of automation is to free up high-value employees to focus on strategic initiatives rather than transactional work.

Webhook

A Webhook is an automated message sent from one application to another when a specific event occurs, essentially providing real-time data or notifications. It’s a method for apps to provide other applications with real-time information. In the context of Keap and HR automation (often via tools like Make.com), a webhook can be used to trigger actions in an external system based on an event in Keap (e.g., a contact’s status changes) or to push data into Keap from another system (e.g., a new application submitted on a career site). Webhooks are crucial for creating seamless integrations and complex, cross-platform automated workflows, enhancing data flow and process efficiency.

Data Hygiene

Data Hygiene refers to the process of cleaning and maintaining the accuracy, consistency, and completeness of data within your CRM and other systems. For HR and recruiting, this means regularly checking for duplicate records, updating outdated contact information, standardizing data formats, and removing irrelevant entries. Poor data hygiene can lead to inefficient automations, inaccurate reporting, and compliance risks. Implementing robust data hygiene practices within Keap ensures that communication is sent to the correct people, segmentation is effective, and strategic decisions are based on reliable information, optimizing all your talent management efforts.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Keap Data Protection & Recovery: The Essential Guide for HR & Recruiting