Welcome to part three of Chaloner’s 101 series! For our final installment, we’re taking a look at the world of communications in a corporate setting. This is a chance for new grads to gain insights into some of their workplace options in the world of communications from industry veterans. Part one focused on the agency experience, and part two focused on the nonprofit world. 

For our third and final article, we’re taking a look at corporate life. We recently interviewed Sarah Murphy, Director of Content and Social Media at Darktrace. Darktrace is a global leader in AI cybersecurity, providing the essential cybersecurity platform to secure organizations today and for an ever-changing future. Darktrace AI learns from each business’s unique data in real time, detecting threats and intervening against attacks with precision and speed. We’ve helped Darktrace find talent in the past, including Sarah.

Sarah’s Career Evolution

Sarah graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with a degree in media and journalism. She was interested in politics and policy and moved to Washington, DC out of school for a role with a large think tank. Wanting to really hone her communications skillset, she joined Burson-Marsteller (now Burson) on their public affairs and crisis team where she had the opportunity to support Intel, Microsoft and Comcast across corporate reputation and public affairs issues. This launched her interest in working inside of a large organization, and she went on to spend over seven years at IBM in New York City, leading communications campaigns for multiple areas of their business, including cloud and AI. 

Sarah started at Darktrace as the Director of Communications for the Americas. She began in a role that focused communications strategy, media relations, and reputation. Eventually that work led her to another area: “I started to work more on the content side, looking at how editorial content could help us tell the Darktrace story and grow our thought leadership. My boss came to me with a new challenge, which was to put more focus on growing our owned content and campaigns, including social media.” 

The world of communications has changed, and currently how a brand represents themselves on social media can have a big impact on how they’re perceived, or, as Sarah put it, “So much of how we, as communicators, do our jobs now relies on really sharp owned content and how we tell our story that way. For example, I had a reporter come to me earlier this week for commentary because they came across interesting content on our website designed for SEO. Owned content is really king, and how you tell your story in a compelling way in this crazy attention economy that we’re in is so important. One of the really fun things about a company like Darktrace is that there’s a lot of willingness to take big swings and try new things.” 

The Value of Agency Work

“I think that people get so much interesting experience from a lot of different places now, but I still see so much value in working on the agency side,” Sarah said. She started her career on the agency side, and she pointed to the exposure to so many different elements of the business  and the range of projects as especially helpful for someone early in their career. “You just get the opportunity to be pulled in on so many different projects and to touch so many different industries. You might have a client for a month that you work on that’s in one sector and then you get to pivot to another. You get to learn what you like and what you gravitate to.” For Sarah, that meant getting to explore public affairs and policy work and then pivoting to issues and crisis work. She got to work with tech clients and loved it. She got to work with financial services clients and didn’t love it. She was able to find her niche and where she wanted to focus her career through her agency work. 

For Sarah, agency was also where she was able to develop a lot of the foundational skills that she still uses today. She learned presentation skills from getting pulled in on new business pitches. “And when you get pulled in on intense media monitoring projects or fact checking projects, you learn about attention to detail. So much of that is so valuable, and the skills are so transferable whether you stay at an agency or you go in house or you go nonprofit. So I do think it’s amazing training.”

The Pros of Being a Corporate Comms Pro

Whether you’re working in an agency, nonprofit, or corporate setting, at the end of the day, there’s never a dull moment in communications. Sarah, like many of her peers in the function, loves the variety in her job. “It’s the classic answer of: every day is different,” Sarah said. “But every day is different because your job is so related to the news and the world and how the world is changing. And I think that that’s just a really fun thing to be at the forefront of and to have to stay on top of.” Aside from the variety and shifting nature of her work and her targets, Sarah also appreciates the opportunities her job brings for learning: “If you love to learn and you’re naturally curious, there’s just constantly something new that you will come across.”

What Sarah Looks for in a Candidate

When it comes to being a hiring manager, Sarah found that there were particular soft skills that felt especially relevant. “Knowing the growth journey that Darktrace is on and our company culture, I knew that I wanted someone who could be really flexible and adaptable, someone who would be super resilient and just want to come in and learn and ask questions but could also pivot as things in the company changed and as we grew and scaled. Someone who would want to be on that type of journey. Things move very fast. We’re constantly changing gears.” 

While cybersecurity and AI require a lot of expertise, having it from the get go was less important to Sarah than having a desire to learn. “I was looking for someone who wanted to learn and would come in and would not be afraid to ask questions or raise their hand and say, ‘I have no idea what you mean when you’re saying ‘VPN’,” she explained. “You can’t know everything, so you just need to have an interest in learning it.” 

As far as hard skills, Sarah wanted someone serious about media relations. “I wanted to get really surgical about media because the media landscape is really changing right now.” But again, the importance of being adaptable arose. “I was looking for someone who could embrace the changing publications landscape and look for new and different ways to engage and build relationships on behalf of Darktrace and was willing to do that in new and different ways. How can you connect with reporters on LinkedIn? Are you reading their work and sharing it and engaging with them on it? There are so many different ways to build relationships now in the media space.” 

Finally, Sarah was looking for someone with strong data skills. They were working on building stronger foundations for measurement and reporting on the value of PR and communications within Darktrace, and it was important to them to bring in someone who wanted to play a role in that and was data-driven. 

Interview Must-Dos

Sarah’s first suggestion to candidates is to always do your homework before going into an interview. “There’s so much information now that you can glean about companies and the people that work for them on LinkedIn. Really make sure you’re taking the time to go through their news page and recent announcements. Showing me that you’ve taken some time to do a little bit of that baseline research or glean the personality of our CEO from what they’re posting on LinkedIn etc., goes a long way.” Interviews go better when you ask a lot of questions, and your research should inform what you ask and why. “It’s important to ask questions about what you’ve read about the company, recent news you’ve seen, the culture, and expectations for the role. The best interviews are two-way discussions!”

Sarah also strongly encourages sending thank you notes. Outside of the fact that many employers expect it as basic interview etiquette and won’t move a candidate forward without one, it can also indicate how you work. As Sarah put it, “When you’re working with media, you want to be responsive, you want to always have the follow up. It’s just a nice way to show that you got something out of the discussion and that you still think you’re a good fit for the role.”

Launching Your Corporate Communications Job Search

Sarah emphasized the value of building your network. “I tell everyone that I talk to that every job I’ve gotten generally has been because I’ve tried to network my way into it,” she said. She was recruited onto the Darktrace team, but that has been a notable exception for her. 

Outside of the benefits to your job search, there’s also the benefits to your work. “The other day I was noodling on a problem related to Reddit, and I just couldn’t figure out what was going on on my own. I put a message in the Mixing Board Slack channel. Someone I had never met before messaged me back. We got on the phone and talked for 20 minutes and it was the most helpful 20 minutes of creative thinking.” Sarah suggested reaching out to people you admire and going to events to grow your network. “If you reach out to professionals that have jobs you admire on LinkedIn, everyone is so willing to talk about their career and how they got there.”

Aside from the importance of networking, Sarah also stated the need to embrace AI. “If you’re not looking at how AI can help you do your job, I think it’s a big problem,” she said. “There’s a really cool tool in Meltwater called Mira that is great at summarization and supporting different analyses for media and social discussions. We’re experimenting with ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.” While Sarah values the things a communications professional brings to tasks like writing, she strongly believes in using AI to do some of the “dirty work” that can consume a lot of your time as a junior staffer. “Test it out. It’s changing how we do our jobs for good and for bad. So knowing how to use it for good is really important.”

Professional Social Channels & Content

LinkedIn is one of Sarah’s favorite platforms. “I’m really fascinated by everything that’s happening with LinkedIn and how fast that platform is changing,” Sarah said. The push to video on LinkedIn has inspired content changes that she’s been enjoying. As an example, Sarah pointed to Jon Gray’s running videos. “It’s so fun. The things that people are doing on LinkedIn to cut through are really interesting.” 

Sarah is also a big fan of following communications and marketing content creators on Substack. As someone relatively new to the content and social media space, she’s found Rachel Karten’s Link in Bio particularly enlightening. “It is probably the most helpful thing I read twice a week. Link in Bio is my go to if you are doing content.” She also highly recommends Alex Kantrowitz’s Big Technology for very informative real-talk on technology.

Aside from her favorite Substacks, as a technology communications professional, Sarah reads CIO Journal and the Wall Street Journal Cybersecurity Pro every day. She reads the Morning Brew for business news and recommends following them on Instagram and LinkedIn for some fun content. She also keeps up with MIT Technology Review for longer form emerging technology and science content. 

Elizabeth

Elizabeth Houde is a Project Manager at Chaloner. After graduating from Guilford College where they majored in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and minored in communications, Elizabeth started their career in New York City in publishing as an editorial coordinator.