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A Glossary of Key Customer Journey Mapping Terms in Keap for HR & Recruiting Professionals

In today’s competitive landscape, understanding and optimizing the candidate and employee journey is paramount for HR and recruiting professionals. Leveraging tools like Keap CRM, strategic customer journey mapping extends beyond traditional sales, becoming a vital framework for attracting, engaging, and retaining top talent. This glossary defines essential terms, offering practical insights into how these concepts apply within an HR and recruiting context, often enhanced through automation.

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer Journey Mapping is the process of visualizing the entire experience a customer has with a company, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. For HR and recruiting, this translates into mapping the “candidate journey” or “employee journey.” It involves understanding the various touchpoints, interactions, emotions, and decisions made by individuals as they engage with your organization. In Keap, this mapping helps design automated campaigns that guide candidates through application, interview, onboarding, and even professional development, ensuring a consistent and positive experience across all stages.

Candidate Journey

The Candidate Journey specifically refers to the sum of experiences a job applicant has with an organization, from their first encounter with a job posting or company brand, through the application and interview processes, to receiving an offer and potentially becoming an employee. Mapping this journey in Keap allows HR and recruiting teams to identify pain points, optimize communication, and automate personalized interactions, such as application confirmations, interview reminders, and post-interview follow-ups. A well-mapped candidate journey enhances employer branding and improves conversion rates for top talent.

Touchpoint

A Touchpoint is any instance where a candidate or employee interacts with your organization, brand, or systems. These can be digital (e.g., job board ads, career page visits, email communications, social media interactions) or physical (e.g., career fairs, in-person interviews, office tours). In a Keap-driven HR strategy, each touchpoint is an opportunity to gather data, provide value, or move a candidate to the next stage. Automating responses and actions at key touchpoints ensures no candidate falls through the cracks and that every interaction is timely and relevant.

Candidate Persona

A Candidate Persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal job applicant, based on market research and data about your existing successful employees. It includes their skills, experience, motivations, goals, pain points, and preferred communication channels. Developing candidate personas helps HR and recruiting teams tailor job descriptions, marketing efforts, and the overall candidate journey. In Keap, personas can be used to segment your talent pool, ensuring that automated communications and outreach efforts are highly personalized and resonate with specific candidate types, increasing engagement and quality of applicants.

Journey Stage

Journey Stages are distinct phases or milestones within the overall candidate or employee journey. For example, in recruiting, stages might include “Awareness,” “Application,” “Screening,” “Interview,” “Offer,” and “Onboarding.” For existing employees, stages could be “Onboarding,” “Development,” “Performance Review,” and “Offboarding.” Defining these stages in Keap is crucial for building logical automation sequences. As a candidate or employee moves from one stage to the next, Keap can automatically trigger specific actions, update records, and send targeted communications, streamlining administrative tasks for HR.

Keap CRM

Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) is a powerful CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and marketing automation platform designed for small businesses. In an HR and recruiting context, Keap serves as a central database for managing candidate information, tracking progress through the hiring pipeline, and automating communication. It allows HR teams to build and deploy sophisticated campaigns for talent acquisition, applicant nurturing, and even employee engagement. Its robust automation capabilities make it ideal for personalizing candidate experiences at scale and reducing manual administrative burdens.

Automation

Automation in HR and recruiting refers to the use of technology to perform repetitive tasks automatically, without human intervention. This can include sending automated email responses to applicants, scheduling interviews, updating candidate statuses, or initiating onboarding sequences. By integrating automation within Keap, HR professionals can save significant time, reduce errors, ensure compliance, and free up staff to focus on higher-value activities like strategic talent planning and direct candidate engagement. Automation ensures a consistent and efficient experience for all candidates.

Workflow Automation

Workflow Automation is a specific type of automation that involves designing and implementing a series of automated steps or tasks that execute in a predefined sequence. For HR, this could be an applicant screening workflow where, upon application submission, Keap automatically sends a confirmation email, schedules a skills assessment, and if passed, notifies the hiring manager. These automated workflows eliminate manual hand-offs, standardize processes, and significantly accelerate the time-to-hire, leading to a more efficient and less error-prone recruiting process.

Segmentation

Segmentation is the process of dividing a large pool of candidates or employees into smaller groups based on shared characteristics, behaviors, or preferences. For example, candidates could be segmented by skill set, desired role, geographic location, or prior experience with the company. In Keap, segmentation allows HR and recruiting teams to deliver highly targeted and relevant communications. Instead of sending a generic email to all applicants, you can segment candidates for specific roles and send personalized messages that increase engagement and improve the quality of responses.

Applicant Scoring

Applicant Scoring is a method used to assign a numerical value to job candidates based on predefined criteria, helping to prioritize and identify the most qualified or promising individuals. Criteria can include skills, experience, cultural fit, responses to specific application questions, or interactions with automated content. In Keap, you can set up automation rules to automatically score applicants as they complete certain actions or provide specific information. This allows HR to quickly identify top-tier candidates, focus recruiting efforts more effectively, and streamline the screening process.

Onboarding Experience

The Onboarding Experience encompasses all the interactions and processes a new hire goes through from the moment they accept a job offer until they are fully integrated and productive in their role. A well-designed onboarding experience reduces turnover and accelerates time-to-productivity. Keap can automate significant portions of the onboarding journey, from sending welcome emails and providing access to necessary documents to scheduling introductory meetings and training modules. This ensures a consistent, organized, and positive start for every new employee, reducing administrative burden on HR.

Employee Lifecycle

The Employee Lifecycle describes the various stages an employee passes through during their tenure with an organization, from recruitment and hiring to development, retention, and eventually, offboarding. Understanding and optimizing each stage of the employee lifecycle is crucial for talent management and retention. While Keap is often associated with the “customer” journey, its automation capabilities can be adapted to manage aspects of the employee lifecycle, such as automating performance review reminders, training enrollments, or internal communications, enhancing the overall employee experience.

Integration

Integration refers to the process of connecting different software applications and systems so they can share data and functionality seamlessly. For HR and recruiting using Keap, integration might involve connecting Keap with an applicant tracking system (ATS), a calendar scheduling tool, an HRIS (Human Resources Information System), or a video conferencing platform. Effective integrations eliminate manual data entry, reduce errors, and create a single source of truth for candidate and employee information, drastically improving efficiency across the entire talent management process.

Feedback Loop

A Feedback Loop is a system where the output of a process or action is used as input to adjust or improve the same process or a subsequent one. In HR and recruiting, establishing feedback loops means actively soliciting and analyzing input from candidates (e.g., post-interview surveys) and new hires (e.g., onboarding surveys). Keap can automate the distribution of these surveys and collect responses, allowing HR teams to quickly identify areas for improvement in their candidate journey or employee experience strategies. This continuous improvement model is vital for staying competitive in talent acquisition.

Conditional Logic

Conditional Logic is a programming concept that allows an automation or workflow to make decisions based on specific criteria or conditions (“if X, then Y”). In Keap, conditional logic is fundamental to building intelligent and personalized automated campaigns. For example, “IF a candidate scores above 80 on the assessment, THEN send them an interview invitation; ELSE send a rejection email.” This enables HR and recruiting teams to create dynamic journeys that adapt to individual candidate responses, ensuring relevance and efficiency without manual intervention for every decision.

Nurture Sequence

A Nurture Sequence is a series of automated, pre-scheduled communications designed to build a relationship and guide an individual towards a desired action over time. In recruiting, this could be a “candidate nurture sequence” for passive talent, where a series of emails shares company culture insights, employee testimonials, and career opportunities. Implemented in Keap, nurture sequences help keep your brand top-of-mind with promising candidates who aren’t immediately ready to apply, ensuring a robust talent pipeline for future roles and reducing the time and cost of recruitment.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: The Unbroken Keap HR & Recruiting Activity Timeline: Protection & Recovery with CRM-Backup

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