Episode 55: Katherine Karaus, Google - Getting hired and career progression in content and UX

Kristina Halvorson:
This is the content strategy podcast and I’m your host, Kristina Halvorson. On each and every episode I interview someone I admire who’s doing meaningful work in content strategy and all its adjacent disciplines. If you care about making content more useful, usable and inclusive for all, welcome in, you have found your people.

Hello, hello. Welcome back. Welcome back. We're back again. I have the coolest person on the podcast today. I'm super excited to introduce you to her and to tell you how I met her. Let me tell you about her first. Katherine Karaus is a cat lady and a UX writer in that order. She lives in the great state of Colorado and works as a senior UX writer on Google's Help Experience team. She mentors up and coming writers on ADPList and recently developed and taught a new voice and tone class at the School of Visual Concepts. In her spare time, she enjoys home cooking, fermentation projects, and pole dancing. And that is the final bullet on a list that absolutely no one suspected would be on there. Katherine, welcome. You're going to have to talk to me about the pole dancing. We don't need to start with that, but it's going to come back around.

Katherine Karaus:
Yes, of course. Sounds good, Kristina. Thank you so much for having me.
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Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah, absolutely. What is it that you like to ferment? Wait, is ferment the verb? Ferment is the verb.

Katherine Karaus:
Yeah, yeah, I guess that would be the verb. I like making kimchi a lot. That's just something I always have in my fridge because it's delicious and nutritious. I make some sauerkraut as well. I don't know. I haven't gotten into... You can ferment almost anything. I'm starting a garden though this year, so if it goes well, boy howdy, anything could happen.
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Kristina Halvorson:
You are living the life that I often tell myself I should be living, and yet I don't. I mean, home cooking, fermentation and pole dancing, you're getting something very right that I clearly have gotten wrong.

Hey, Katherine, I want to tell our listeners today how we met. Katherine was a registered attendee for Confab last year in 2022. For all of our Confab attendees, we offered the opportunity to pitch for a lightning talk. A lightning talk is a five-minute talk that you give on the main stage, and you have five minutes and five minutes only. We often get people who actually go on to the main stage and just stellar speakers. It's my favorite, favorite part of every conference that we do.

Katherine took the stage and gave an absolutely knockdown, blowout five-minute presentation called Get That Money: Negotiation for Super Expensive Writers. That's you. I may have gotten on my feet at the end of it. I certainly was doing a lot of whooping and "Yes, queen," like the old lady that I am along the way, but it just blew me out of the water specifically because... Well, I'll explain that in just a second. First of all, I have to start with the same question I always start with, which is, can you tell us a little bit about your journey to content strategy, content design, and being a UX writer at Google?

Katherine Karaus:
Sure. Everybody has a journey in this industry, that's for sure, because they don't tell you about this job in college. I was a theater major.

Kristina Halvorson:
Oh! Katherine, I was a theater major.

Katherine Karaus:
I don't know if you remember Confab 2020. I started this theater people group, and you were in my DMs.

Kristina Halvorson:
Oh my gosh, I didn't know that was you. That's right.

Katherine Karaus:
Yeah, that was me.

Kristina Halvorson:
I was all up in that. That's right. I have so many journalism majors and psych majors, so every once in a while I get a theater major.

Katherine Karaus:
Yeah.

Kristina Halvorson:
... talking about it.

Katherine Karaus:
I know.

Kristina Halvorson:
At the end of this call, we'll sing some songs from [inaudible 00:04:18] together. Sorry, go on.

Katherine Karaus:
Well, we... Who's we? I and my cat, we graduated and I had no plan, so I took a whole string of subsistence jobs. I was a receptionist, I was a temp, I was a temp receptionist, kind of did it all. In the meantime, I was volunteering my time at night for my local theater company, shout out Annex Theater in Seattle. That was great, but the lifestyle of 14-hour days for almost no money was catching up with me. So I decided I needed to figure out my career, figure out my job. I'd started thinking about early retirement, and could that be possible?

So I decided to transition into tech because I saw there was a lot of opportunity. It's a growth area. There must be something in there for me that I can do. Eventually, I started copywriting, realized that that was something that I was great at. From that minute, I was like, "Okay, I know what I want to do. I want to take words and use them to make the internet better." So I started teaching myself UX writing, learning a lot, reading stuff on Medium. I was day jobbing. I was side hustling. I was just kind of trying to stuff all the information in my brain and try things out. So I built up a client base. I went full-time freelance.

When I moved to San Diego, I got picked up at a contract at Intuit as a content designer, so finally I was there with the right job title, getting that big company experience. My next role was at LinkedIn. I have switched jobs a couple of times to try and find my right fit. I think that's what we're going to talk about today a little bit. But now I'm at Google, and I'm on the right team at Google. I'm working at the Help Center. My opinions are my own. Definitely not representing Google. I have to get that in there.

Kristina Halvorson:
I am just a little gobsmacked at how very similar our journeys are. I too was working in theater and decided that perhaps I would like a car that was not my grandmother's from 1983.

Katherine Karaus:
I would like a nap. I would like-

Kristina Halvorson:
A nap, that's correct.

Katherine Karaus:
... some money.

Kristina Halvorson:
I would like some self-respect. In fact, I had... I'm still in touch with several really great friends from that period of time, professional playwrights who went on to make a living at this. But they always teased me because at one point they were asking me what my next steps in the theater were, and I was just like, "Well, I have to work this other job because I have a mortgage." They were just like, "Okay, well, thanks for that." Anyway, how wonderful that you landed in UX writing. It really speaks to your talent and your ability to communicate clearly and your charisma that you were able to land those contracts and those jobs with those big name tech companies after basically just inventing yourself as a UX writer.

Katherine Karaus:
Yeah, it's hard. It's so much a marketing job to get a job in this industry, big time.

Kristina Halvorson:
Say more about that.

Katherine Karaus:
Oh gosh, where to begin? One thing that I tell people really, really all the time is invest in your personal brand. It is so important to be able to cut through the noise of jobs that may have 50 applicants, 100 applicants, 400 applicants, depending on where you are. It's so important to invest time and energy and, if you have it, some money into your personal branding.

For me, what that meant was back in 2017 when I was first going full-time freelance, I was like, "I need a website, and I need good photos of myself for that website." I did it kind of on a shoestring budget. I invested about $2,500 in this project. I hired someone I knew from college who was just starting out her web design business, so I got a screaming deal on her services. She really helped me put together a website that made sense that had different packages and services that I could offer people. I reached out to a local headshot photographer who I knew and was like, "Hey, I know you don't do brand photos, but would you do brand photos for me?" She was like, "Yeah, sure, we can try that." She gave me a really good deal because she's used to just doing headshots for actors. It was like a new thing for her, too.

I combined all of this, and I made this website that was very neat. It was very Millennial pink, which I've evolved beyond that at this point. I did that investment, and it's really some of the best investment I've ever made in myself because it was like, "I have this website. I have this narrative." People could read it and see me and see what I was about and see or get an idea of what it might be like to work with me. Of course, I did all the copywriting, and I made it super me. My favorite button text I've ever written was on that original site. It was "Get fresh hot words," which, I don't know, it makes me chuckle.

Kristina Halvorson:
You can do it. You know why?

Katherine Karaus:
Yeah, you can do whatever you want.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's why you can do whatever you want. The reason I was especially interested in this topic, and we were chatting a little bit about this before we hit record, is that obviously every time I log into LinkedIn, which is everybody's new home now as we're seeing every day somebody else is just like, "Well, I was let go of my job. Well, my whole team was let go. Well, there's going to be 10% work reduction. I'm really worried about my position." I'm getting tons of DMs and emails just from people either concerned or who've lost gigs. So it's really serious out there right now. When we first connected it was because you were talking about how to go after the big money, which in this environment might seem pretty far down the totem pole for folks. For example, when you talk about a shoestring budget of $2,500, that can be a significant investment for people, especially who've lost their jobs.

Katherine Karaus:
For sure.

Kristina Halvorson:
Do you feel like folks who are out there kind of looking that this is still an investment that they should consider? How is that a competitive differentiator, I guess, when you're applying for jobs?

Katherine Karaus:
That's such a great question. First of all, I would never, ever recommend that people spend money they don't have to make some kind of career move. There are often free or cheap or cheaper ways to accomplish everything. You can get your friend with a nice smartphone to take some good photos, and that could be good enough for your initial website. You can do a Squarespace site, drag and drop. You do not have to pay someone to do this for you. That was what was accessible to me in the moment, and I was like, "All right, I think it's worth it."

I think it is so important to consider your professional presence no matter what the economic climate is. Even when jobs are abundant and you are hot shit, you still want to be telling your story to the best of your ability, and that doesn't change at all when things are a little bit more rough. I would say maybe you're looking for different kinds of opportunities. Maybe you're more open to freelance roles now since in-house roles are less available, or maybe you're open to contract work when you wouldn't have been before. So all of that may shift. What you're willing to accept or what you need to accept is going to change. But the way you tell your story, those fundamentals are still great.

I always recommend having that strong personal brand built up because you can always lose your job. Even in a hot economy in the States, we have at-will employment. If your boss doesn't like you, you can be just as screwed as if there's a major economic problem. At the risk of sounding way too negative, always be prepared for potential job loss because it can happen to anyone at any time, and having your materials all ready to go and polished and your portfolio up to date... I know mine's a little out date at this time, so I need to take my own advice. Having those materials really reflects you, and be concise and scannable and understandable will help you hit the ground running if something bad does happen to your employment situation.

Kristina Halvorson:
Talk to me about the portfolio question, because I've heard good and I've heard bad, I've heard necessary and I've heard not necessary. What role does the portfolio play? What should be in it? Who should have one? Is it just for writers? Content strategists who are working on websites or enterprise, should they have one too? Talk to me about what you think about the portfolio.

Katherine Karaus:
Ooh, so many topics in there. 

Kristina Halvorson:
Oh, I do that. I'm sorry. I do do that.

Katherine Karaus:
It's okay. It's okay. You've pointed me in a direction. We can talk.

Kristina Halvorson:
I'm like the scarecrow.

Katherine Karaus:
Very good. Good work.

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah, thanks.

Katherine Karaus:
I talk to people all the time who are looking to get into UX writing, and they may be building up their portfolio for the first time. I know there's a lot of controversy around portfolios. Some people are saying, "No, you shouldn't have to have one." But every job I've ever applied for pretty much requires a portfolio link. Whether that is a Google Drive folder that has a couple of work samples in it or something more polished like a website, I think you do need those samples because employers are looking for them. They're generally going to want to see some indication that you have done some kind of UX writing. So have something. Something is better than nothing. Done is better than good. Have a thing is the first piece of advice.

The second piece of advice is to keep it really, really short and focused and scannable because your first layer that you have to get through is the recruiters, and they are basically just scanning for, "Is this person a UX writer? Do they have UX writing samples? I look at them, do they look relatively polished?" They're not going to be doing that deep dive into your process. That's going to happen later in the interview process. So you have to remember your audience. You are appealing to recruiters who are scanning. Nothing against the long case study if you want to house it on your website, but I always, always, always recommend people have a TLDR version at the top where you bring up those statistics. The things that you've accomplished, the results of your project, bring it up top because people are scanning and people are skimming, and they are not going to read your 2,500 word ode to the process.

Generally it's like, you got a content-design the crap out of your portfolio. I had a brief stint as a hiring manager, which was weird, and that was what I was looking for. If I'm seeing that a UX writer isn't being concise and clear in their own portfolio, I'm also kind of going, "Can you do this work? Is this the job for you if you're not able to clearly express your work and its impact?" because we do that all dang day.

Kristina Halvorson:
As someone who has been hiring for 20 years, I can attest to, yes, everything you are saying is correct. In fact, I will share with you right now that the project manager who I hired a couple of years ago, I received 90 applications off of LinkedIn, and she was the only one that sent me a cover letter.

Katherine Karaus:
Ooh.

Kristina Halvorson:‍

Yeah, that's true.

Katherine Karaus:
A cover letter.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's true. I interviewed her first, and then I didn't need to interview anybody else.

Katherine Karaus:
That is such a great testament to the cover letter. 

Kristina Halvorson:
I know, right? I wasn't even... I don't know. The things that you can do to be more conversational, to bring your own voice to the application without it being too much and still being able to preserve that clarity and brevity, I agree with you. I think it's so important.

Here's what I'd like to know, because you spent the greater part of 2021 and 2022 in the middle of a pandemic looking for work. You had a couple of hits, you had a couple of misses during that time, but it seems like you honed in on, during the job hunt process, "Here are the questions I need to be asking. Here are the ways I can be talking about myself in those conversations beyond the portfolio, beyond the cover letter." Tell me a little bit about what you learned. What were your dos and don'ts during that time?

Katherine Karaus:
Ooh, dos and don'ts. Well, first of all, do have an elevator pitch. You're going to get sick of saying it over and over again if you're getting a good amount of interviews. You definitely need an answer to the "Tell me about yourself." It needs to be about your career, so briefly tell your career story. Briefly talk about what motivates you, maybe why you enjoy this work, why you got into it. Maybe mention some core skills or key product areas that you enjoy working in. You might want to tailor that pitch based on who you're talking to. If you're talking to a company where they're in a particular area of interest, you can bring in other experiences from your life. So you really want that to be accessible to you at any time. You want it to be polished, but you also want to be able to know your audience a little bit and add in whatever details you think might help the recruiter or the hiring manager get connected to you and connect you to the business and connect you to the business need.

Kristina Halvorson:
I'm going to interrupt really quickly. What you're actually saying is that, because this honestly never occurred to me, that you had the opportunity to put together an actual well-crafted story where you're hitting the high points and that it's something that you practiced when people come at you with that question.

Katherine Karaus:
Yeah.

Kristina Halvorson:

Wow.

Katherine Karaus:

I'm pretty good at winging it and going off the cuff, but if you're not good at winging it, please write it down. Please write your bullet points down and know what you want to say. I certainly had enough practice over a year and a half doing this that I could do it in my sleep. That's going to really help you and help the recruiter make sense of you and your experience. On that first call, they're really looking for just fit. Do you have the skills? Do you have the experience? Do you have any other special diamond qualities that make you shine, like an affinity for the product area or an affinity for the type of team?

I know you mentioned asking questions. That is so, so, so important in this industry because, oh man, the experience you have as a UX writer can be so wildly different depending on the team structure. You could be the only UX writer on a team. You could be responsible for the whole craft, and you could be serving 10 or 15 designers at a time. Or you could be on a more well-resourced team where you're paired with a reasonable amount of designers.

Understanding what you're looking for in that aspect is huge and really poking at, what is the work environment going to be? How good is the understanding of this craft, of my manager? Because you're not always reporting to a writing manager. Sometimes you're reporting to a design manager who doesn't really understand what you're going to do for them. They know maybe that they need help with words, but they're really not sure what that might look like in practice, and you're going to have to show them. So really poking at that team maturity was really big for me because I wanted a team in my last job hunt with more support, but maybe not so much support that the role's going to be boring, if that makes sense.

Kristina Halvorson:
I have a question that you may or may not be able to answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway. During your eternal job hunt, as it were, over those couple of years, talk to me about some mistakes that you made that you were able to take some learnings away?

Katherine Karaus:

Oh, gosh. I hate to say mistakes. I think everything is a learning experience. Really briefly, what happened was I was leaving a job and I needed more work. This sent me on a journey where I changed jobs three times in about a year and a half. I changed companies twice. Then when I got to Google, I discovered that things were not the way that I would hope for on my team, so I moved onto another team. We could call each of these misfires a mistake, but I wouldn't because I met some great people along the way. Actually, I worked on some great teams and just met lovely folks and had lovely experiences, but for whatever reason, the job was not it. So it was very long and very hard.

I think the experience all added up to a sense of being perpetually onboarding, and I'm just beginning to get over that feeling. That's such a struggle because you feel like you're not really contributing in your first couple of months. You're just meeting people. Then as soon as you start contributing, then it's like, well, something happens that says, "This is not the right place. I have another better opportunity, so I'm going to move on." I don't know. I wouldn't call them mistakes. I would call them learning experiences. Maybe this isn't the best answer.

Kristina Halvorson:

Well, that is unusual for somebody to be confident enough in themselves, frankly, to just say, "Well, I took this job and I can tell already that this is not going to be a good fit either for me or for the organization. So I'm just going to call it and move on, rather than sticking around for two years and going through the motions, even though I know in my gut that this is not going to last."

Katherine Karaus:

I think that's so important. People getting caught up in layoffs right now, especially, it's like, dude, the level of organizational chaos that is out there in corporate America is high, and it has always been high, and you get swept up in it. Sometimes you join an organization and you thought it was going to be a great opportunity, but everything is giving you the heebie-jeebies and you just have to leave. That is very no-fault stuff. I always recommend it's okay to change course when you know that something is not serving you. There is no magical number of years that you need to be at a job that will make that job a legitimate part of your experience. That's just not true. I was at Squarespace for about seven months. I launched a new product, and I branded that product, and I helped that team get away from a horrifying internal naming choice. I can be really proud of that, and I can point to that, even though I didn't stick around for a long time.

Kristina Halvorson:

I have to say that what I'm hearing in your voice is that sort of outstanding self-confidence that was just blowing on stage at Confab. It is just self-worth shining through, which is gorgeous to see in a human being. So I do want to ask, because respecting to your point the fact that some people just need security and that that's top of mind, whether it's for your family or due to a health concern or just due to your values, that is worth it.

But I also think, and I will say, especially when it comes to women, that still having the confidence to say, "This is not right for me," or walking into a job, "This is what I'm worth, and this is what I'm going to ask for and potentially hold out for," that's a unique characteristic. I wish that it weren't, but it is. Can you talk a little bit about the things you talked about in your lightning talk at Confab, mindset for negotiation, tactics for negotiation? Because, yes, you need to go get that money, but I also just think some of these tactics are important just in terms of having boundaries and setting expectations in life.

Katherine Karaus:

Absolutely. Well, I'll go back in time just a tiny bit. Early in my career, I had several truly horrifying negotiation experiences. For example, I was working as a temp at this insurance company. I had taken over a woman's full-time job. I was crushing it. They really needed to hire me and bring me on full time. So they eventually did.

My boss sat me down in the room. It was a union shop, so he put a piece of paper in front of me. It showed the schedule of wages, the minimum wages that you can pay a union member when they're hired at six months and of a year. He pointed to this piece of paper, and he pointed to the middle number, and he said, "We're going to give you this six-month starting wage because you've already been here." I was like, "Oh, thank you." I said, "I'd like to negotiate this. I think this role is really important, and this is what it pays in other areas. I've been crushing it. You can look at my work. It's really great."

My would-be boss pointed at the sheet of paper that he had in front of me and he said, "I'm sorry, this is the maximum that we can pay you." The sheet of paper, we'll recall, said minimum. So I pointed this out. He just kept repeating that the union would not allow him to pay me more. It was a lie. It was a blatant lie. It was so deeply offensive, every part of this. It's like, "Wow, do you think I'm stupid, or do you just think I'm so scared that I'm going to say yes, that I'm going to agree to this?" So I ended up letting my contract expire. It was like over the next day. My team lead, who was actually managing all of my work, burst into tears when she heard, because what was she going to do without me? That was just one of the experiences I've had. There have been others. I don't know if other women have also experienced this. But I think there's a huge level of adversarial-ness that can happen in negotiations when you're dealing with bad actors.

Anyway, all that to say, when I came into tech, I was like, "I really want to feel confident in negotiating because I know I'm going to negotiate even though it's scary and even though people have treated me like garbage in the past before when I've tried." So I decided I was going to hire a negotiation coach. Shout out, Ann Marie Houghtailing, she's amazing. I hired her to help me with my first negotiations in tech. She just taught me all of these wonderful tactics to use that would position you on the same side as your recruiter or whoever you're negotiating with.

You want to use really collaborative language, like, "I'm so excited for this role. Thank you so much for the offer." You always want to thank them for the offer, even if it's insulting. Keep it inside. Just say thank you. You want to reiterate the value that you bring. There's no shame in writing out bullet points. I love this tip for writers too. You do not have to negotiate on the phone. If you are so freaked out by this, you can always just say, "Thank you, I need to review it. Could you send me some information on the benefits, and I'll get back to you." Then you can move the negotiation to email, which blissfully is our favorite place because we get to take our time and we get to choose our words really carefully.

That's what I like to do. Then I write out some bullet points about why I'm an awesome fit, why I'm excited about the role, and I make my big, audacious ask, whatever that is for that situation. I kind of came into this industry with a lot of fear around negotiation, and hiring a coach really helped me build those skills. So now I know that if things go south, it's not my fault. I've done my best, and I know I've used the right language. If someone responds negatively to me, it's on them, and I can put that in the dodged-a-bullet bucket.

Kristina Halvorson:

This is all genius. If someone is not able to hire a coach, do you have resources where they can go? Are there books that you could recommend on the topic? Are there newsletters or podcasts that you could recommend?

Katherine Karaus:

I have a cheat sheet that I like to share with people. It also has all the information from my coach and her mentee, so I can share that with you in the show notes.

Kristina Halvorson:

That's amazing. Did you hear that? Check the show notes. Jackpot. Well, this is great. We are at time. I do feel like there are 80 other topics I could chat with you about, not only theater and pole dancing, which we didn't get to.

Katherine Karaus:

I know. We never got back to that.

Kristina Halvorson:

Do you have anything that you'd like to say about pole dancing before we wrap?

Katherine Karaus:

I would. If you've been thinking about trying it, go try it. But be careful. If somebody's telling you to go upside down in your first class, don't do it. Don't do it. Be really careful. I am right now in teacher training with Vertical Fusion, which is a local studio in the Boulder area. They're so wonderful and so safety conscious. The women there are just completely supportive and weird and amazing. It's just a beautiful community where you get to do things with your body that you did not think you could do.

Kristina Halvorson:

I want to tell you, at the age of 51 after two kids, I'm pretty confident there are things with my body that I cannot do. Although, of course-

Katherine Karaus:

I will say, our studio owner just turned 50 and is a grandma and mom of four.

Kristina Halvorson:

Oh God, this is like the fermentation thing. What are you doing? You're just putting me in my place about stuff I should do. All right, all right, I'll check out pole dancing.

Katherine Karaus:

You can do it. I believe in you.

Kristina Halvorson:

I can do it. I can do anything. I'm a content strategist, dammit.

Katherine Karaus:

Yes, yeah, that's right.

Kristina Halvorson:

Katherine, thank you so much for your time and energy and perspective and stories today. Where can people find you online?

Katherine Karaus:

Oh, LinkedIn, all the time. I'm so on LinkedIn, it's upsetting.

Kristina Halvorson:

What do you love about LinkedIn?

Katherine Karaus:

Well, I used to work there, so I'm very biased and shilling. I love it because I've actually made real-world friends on LinkedIn. It's a professional platform, so people are behaving themselves a lot more than other places on the internet. It's also kind of growing into an area where you can have really interesting political discussions about work and about working conditions, which I think is always a fun time.

Kristina Halvorson:

Oh, I have to tell you, I miss Twitter. I miss the Twitter finer days, but I'll try to get back to LinkedIn. I know. It's a real-

Katherine Karaus:

You're not going to pay for that blue check?

Kristina Halvorson:

I'm not. I am grieving. But that's a different podcast.

Kristina Halvorson:

Katherine, thank you so much for being with us today.

Katherine Karaus:

Thank you so much for having me.

‍Kristina Halvorson:Thanks so much for joining me for this week’s episode of the Content Strategy Podcast. Our podcast is brought to you by Brain Traffic, a content strategy services and events company. It’s produced by Robert Mills with editing from Bare Value. Our transcripts are from REV.com. You can find all kinds of episodes at contentstrategy.com and you can learn more about Brain Traffic at braintraffic.com. See you soon.