A Glossary of Key Terms: Contact Record Fields & Attributes in Keap

For HR and recruiting professionals, the efficiency and effectiveness of talent acquisition hinge on robust data management. Understanding how to leverage Contact Record Fields and Attributes within Keap CRM is paramount for automating workflows, personalizing outreach, and maintaining a streamlined hiring process. This glossary defines essential terms, providing clarity on how each impacts your strategic recruitment efforts and operational efficiency.

Contact Record

The fundamental building block in Keap, a Contact Record is a comprehensive digital profile for an individual. For recruiters, this serves as the candidate’s master file, housing all pertinent information—from initial application details to interview notes and hiring status. A well-maintained contact record ensures that every interaction is logged, providing a complete historical view that prevents redundancies and facilitates personalized, informed candidate management throughout the talent lifecycle. It’s the central hub for all data points collected about a prospective or current employee.

Standard Fields

These are the pre-defined data fields universally present in Keap for every contact, such as First Name, Last Name, Email Address, Phone Number, and Company. While basic, Standard Fields are crucial for initial candidate identification and primary communication channels. For recruiting, these fields form the baseline for essential contact information, allowing for immediate outreach and ensuring you can readily connect with candidates. Accuracy in these fields is vital for preventing communication errors and maintaining a professional candidate experience.

Custom Fields

Beyond standard data, Custom Fields allow users to define and capture unique information specific to their business operations. In recruiting, this means creating fields for “Candidate’s Preferred Role,” “Skills Competency Score,” “Last Interview Date,” “Salary Expectations,” or “Notice Period.” These fields are indispensable for deep candidate profiling, enabling recruiters to store granular data that supports highly targeted segmentation, advanced filtering, and more intelligent automation sequences based on specific qualifications and preferences.

Lead Score (Contact Score)

A numerical value assigned to a contact, indicating their engagement level or suitability based on predefined criteria. In a recruiting context, a Lead Score might increase when a candidate visits a careers page, opens specific job alerts, or meets ideal skill criteria. Conversely, it might decrease if they opt out of communications. Lead Scoring helps recruiters prioritize candidates, identifying those who are most engaged or best fit for a role, enabling a more efficient allocation of recruitment resources and faster response times for high-potential applicants.

Campaign (Keap Automation)

Within Keap, a Campaign is a pre-designed sequence of automated actions triggered by specific contact behaviors or criteria. For HR and recruiting, this translates into powerful automated workflows. Examples include an automated onboarding sequence for new hires, a drip campaign to nurture passive candidates over time, a series of emails to guide applicants through the interview process, or follow-up communications post-interview. Campaigns reduce manual effort, ensure consistent communication, and enhance the overall candidate experience.

Segmentation

Segmentation is the process of dividing your entire contact database into smaller, distinct groups based on shared characteristics, attributes, or behaviors. In recruiting, this might involve segmenting candidates by skill set, geographic location, years of experience, or their stage in the hiring pipeline. Effective segmentation allows recruiters to deliver highly personalized messages, tailor job opportunities to specific audiences, and run targeted campaigns, significantly improving the relevance and effectiveness of outreach efforts compared to a one-size-fits-all approach.

Data Hygiene

Data hygiene refers to the practices and processes employed to maintain the cleanliness, accuracy, and completeness of your contact data within Keap. This includes identifying and merging duplicate records, correcting erroneous information, updating outdated contact details, and removing unsubscribed or inactive contacts. For HR and recruiting, robust data hygiene is critical for preventing miscommunications, ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations (like GDPR/CCPA), and building trust with candidates by interacting with up-to-date, accurate information.

Automation

In Keap, automation refers to pre-set rules that automatically perform specific actions based on defined triggers or conditions. In recruiting, automations can range from sending an instant “application received” confirmation email, scheduling an interview reminder, updating a candidate’s status upon form submission, or assigning a task to a recruiter when a candidate reaches a specific stage. Automation dramatically reduces manual administrative tasks, ensures timely communication, and frees up recruiters to focus on high-value activities like candidate engagement.

Permissions & User Roles

These features in Keap define the level of access and capabilities each user has within the CRM system. Permissions dictate what specific data users can view, edit, or delete, while User Roles group these permissions for different job functions (e.g., Administrator, Recruiter, Hiring Manager). For HR teams, robust permissions and user roles are vital for maintaining data security, ensuring compliance, preventing unauthorized data modification, and tailoring the CRM experience to each team member’s responsibilities, streamlining their workflow without compromising data integrity.

Data Export

Data Export is the process of extracting contact information and associated data from Keap into a transferable format, typically a CSV or Excel file. Recruiting professionals often utilize data exports for various purposes, such as generating detailed reports on hiring metrics, performing advanced analytics outside of Keap, auditing contact lists, or preparing data for migration to other systems. This capability is essential for deep insights into pipeline performance, candidate sourcing effectiveness, and overall recruitment strategy evaluation.

Merge Fields

Merge Fields (also known as personalization fields) are placeholders inserted into email templates, documents, or communication scripts that are automatically replaced with a contact’s specific data when the message is sent. For example, a merge field for `~Contact.FirstName~` would automatically populate with a candidate’s first name. In recruiting, merge fields are critical for personalizing mass communications, making job alerts, interview confirmations, and follow-up emails feel individually crafted, thereby enhancing the candidate experience and improving engagement rates.

Notes & History

The Notes & History section of a Contact Record provides a chronological log of all interactions, communications, and internal comments related to that specific contact. This includes emails sent, phone calls made, appointments scheduled, and any manual notes added by team members. For recruiting, this feature is invaluable for maintaining a comprehensive audit trail of every candidate touchpoint, facilitating seamless team collaboration, providing context for future interactions, and ensuring consistency throughout the recruitment process, preventing miscommunication and ensuring transparency.

Opt-in/Opt-out Status

This attribute indicates a contact’s consent to receive communications from your organization, specifically marketing or bulk messages. An “opt-in” status means the contact has given permission, while “opt-out” signifies they have withdrawn consent. For HR and recruiting, meticulously managing opt-in/opt-out status is non-negotiable for compliance with data privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and CAN-SPAM. Ignoring this can lead to legal penalties, damage your brand reputation, and erode trust with potential candidates.

Integration

Integration refers to the seamless connection and data synchronization between Keap and other third-party software systems. In a recruiting ecosystem, this could involve connecting Keap with an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), HR Information System (HRIS), calendar scheduling tools, or even video conferencing platforms. Effective integrations eliminate manual data entry, reduce human error, ensure consistent data across platforms, and create a truly unified and automated talent acquisition workflow, significantly enhancing operational efficiency for HR and recruiting teams.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Mastering Keap CRM Data Recovery: Avoid Mistakes & Ensure Business Continuity

By Jack DeePublished On: January 14, 2026