Thanks to the rise of companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, the fight to attract and retain top tech talent has never been as fierce.

While TV, which has rapidly transitioned to multiscreen streaming distribution, remains a decent draw for young adults coming out of college, it also doesn’t hurts to take that extra step and go direct to the source.

Recruiting from that talent pool has been one of the benefits of Fox Sports University, a partnership program that’s now in its 10th year and works with more than 40 major colleges and universities and, so far, with more than 5,000 graduate and undergraduate students.

Fox Sports estimates that more than 100 of those students have been hired as interns or in a full-time capacity. The program has also led to several new tech initiatives involving virtual reality, 360-degree video and augmented reality.

“The whole goal of the Fox Sports University program is to bring the real world into the classroom,” Molly Stires, manager of marketing and strategic partnerships at Fox Sports, said.

Those classroom projects, which are run in conjunction with the Fox Sports leadership team and tied to priorities and challenges faced by that division, “can touch different parts of our business,” she added, pointing to areas that have spanned production, marketing, social media and digital distribution.

As for the program, Fox Sports engages with those students at the start of the semester, and during that period, stays in communication with them, providing feedback and course corrections. At the end of the semester, students present their ideas, and Fox Sports analyzes them and then picks the winners, identifies the deliverables and works with the students on the execution stage.

“We want to bring the idea to life,” Stires said. “We’ll host a number of preproduction calls and walk them through [the process].”

Some relatively recent tech-oriented projects include one at St. John’s University in New York, where students built a strategy for Fox Sports VR content around the Big East men’s basketball tournament. The winning team joined and aided the Fox Sports production team on-site.

At USC, students are now creating tech integration concepts for future Fox Sports NASCAR broadcasts, including how data can be collected to track and represent the action, experimentation with new camera angles, and the use of overlays that can help the viewer better decipher and understand what’s occurring on the racetrack. Those ideas are being evaluated in advance of the 2018 NASCAR season.

Kimberly Borza, who has the same title as Stires at Fox Sports, estimates that the university program has about 16 projects underway now, and expects 20 to 22 of them to be active by next spring.

A 360-Degree Focus
Experimenting with 360-degree video and VR has been a big tech focus at Fox Sports. Getting students involved gives us “a fresh set of eyes” and some new ideas, while also giving them some real-world experience, Zac Fields, senior vice president of graphic tech and integration at Fox Sports, said.

Related: VR Evolution Continues at Fox Sports

Though some of the early work around VR has been around coverage of full sporting events, some ideas stemming from the students included a focus on shorter videos that can give viewers a quick new look and experience of an event, he said.

Student involvement and feedback also gives Fox Sports a sense of whether it is on the right path with new tech-oriented concepts for event coverage, he said.

Stires also stressed that talent recruitment is a significant part of the program.

“We can connect [the students] with recruiters and hiring managers and different people on different teams and [pass along] opportunities that are coming down the pike,” she said. “It also helps to put your resume at the top of the pile.”

To catch a millennial, you have to go where the Pokémon GO fans go. The HR team at Scripps Networks Interactive made that play at a recent information-technology recruitment event in Knoxville, Tenn., and was pleased by the results.

Setting up a booth at CodeStock, the infotech gathering at the Knoxville Convention Center, Scripps HR staffer Christine Jones suggested placing it near a “PokeStop” — a place where Pokémon Go players can collect items they need to capture more Pokémon.

More of the Aug. 22, 2016, Edition of Through the Wire:‘Olympic Channel’ Lets Games Continue| A Commission by Any Other Name

Chris Barksdale, vice president of human resources at Scripps, said that while he couldn’t cite specific figures on how many Pokémon players came by, Scripps recruiters were busy that day speaking with smartphone- carrying people and came away with quite a few leads.

“Pokémon Go had just been released and its use was growing rapidly,” Barksdale said in a Scripps blog post on the topic. “We figured setting up near a PokeStop would help drive traffic to our booth, and we were right. Young people today want to experience their work the same way they experience their lives, and that’s frequently through their [smart]phone.”

Cable1Source, a software company that automates employment, personnel and job recruitment information to comply with FCC record-keeping requirements, will launch its service to cable operators in May. 

The new company is a companion to Broadcast1Source, which offers similar job-related services to TV and radio stations and groups. Both services are owned by McLeansville, N.C.-based Litéra Corp., a document management firm that creates software for corporate use, including  government filings.

"The new cable service will let companies manage all their EEO [Equal Employment Opportunity] compliance material and maintain all employment job listings and multiple recruiting lists," explained Lisa Fields, VP/GM of Cable1Source in an exclusive interview with Multichannel News. She said she knows of no comparable, comprehensive employment-reporting service that is currently available to cable operators.

In a preliminary trial, the Cable1Source software was tested at a mid-sized cable system (not identified) where human resources people had compiled and prepared the FCC reports manually. Field said the software generated a report in less than a minute, drawing on material that had been entered into the system at the time of each employment activity.  In comparison, the cable system's traditional manual method of gathering and preparing the report took about 160 hours (two people working for two weeks) for a comparable task, she said.

Field held discussions with some operators during the recent American Cable Association conference in Washington; it is believed that Cable1Source is exploring a relationship that would give ACA members discounts on access to the service. The company will also seek to develop alliances with state cable associations, similar to relationships that Broadcast1Source has with state broadcasting associations.

Like its 14-year-old Broadcast1Source predecessor, the new cable software package will provide a single-source solution to consistent record-keeping, self-monitoring and FCC audit preparedness, including automated creation of material for the FCC's mandated Public Inspection Files (ePIF) that are available on the FCC.gov site.

"Cable hires exponentially more people than radio or TV," Field said, explaining the value of her company's software to MSOs and individual cable systems. She cited FCC requirements such as the "Prong 1, 2 and 3" employment methods that encompass hiring efforts through traditional job application procedures, through relationships with recruiting agencies and through "supplemental outreach" programs such as job fairs or campus presentations.  All of these employment processes must be documented under the FCC rules, Field said.

"We'll let Cable1Source sync to FCC.gov so that it posts the required documents," Field added, noting that a new set of forms will be issued later this year, after approval by the Office of Management and Budget.  She said that the new software will be able to handle such paperwork via automated systems.

Although details about the Cable1Source software and pricing are not yet available, Field said that its core functions will resemble those available in the broadcast product.

"It can track and review all interviews, and it will alert you if you miss a step in the FCC process so that you can take actions from the [system's] dashboard," Field explained. The software can track and record interviews and store resumes and other elements of the hiring and employment process, she said.

Cable1Source also has the ability to track internships, mentoring and other work-related functions that the FCC seeks to document. The dashboard also allows cable operators to check their own self-auditing process for employment-related activities, in compliance with other FCC requirements, the company said.

Cable1Source, which is currently hosted at Litéra-contracted sites, is expected to move to a cloud-based secure service later this year.

RELATED:Special Report > Building Pay TV’s Workforce of the Future [subscription required]

Recruiting in the digital age is challenging pay TV operators and programmers as they struggle to fill digital and technology jobs. Two recruiters specializing in the media/entertainment industry – Renee Hauch, EVP of recruiter Carlsen Resources, and Lisa Kaye, president and CEO of online jobs network Greenlightjobs.com -- shared their perspective on that challenge and tips on how pay TV companies can meet it with Multichannel News contributing editor Leslie Jaye Goff. An edited transcript follows.

MCN: What are the high-priority and hard-to-fill jobs in the digital and tech domains?

Lisa Kaye: Engineers, programmers, content developers who can think about new ways of what’s hot, social media marketing people. Every company needs the people who sit behind the scenes in social media, and that didn’t even exist five to eight years ago.

IT people are like accountants – you always need them. Engineers with multiple skill sets – who understand how the content is produced and can hard code – are must-haves.

I think the metrics-driven jobs -- anything in analytics, whether data analytics, programming analytics, research analytics – are very popular now. Any role that focuses on gathering data relative to viewership and usership and ownership, and any data relative to the look-and-feel of what viewers are experiencing is very hot.

Renee Hauch: Whereas analytics used to be separate, now it’s becoming more a part of lots of jobs across different departments, from finance to marketing. Companies want people who can really understand those numbers and turn that data into a new show, a new set of subscribers, a new platform.

So while there has always been a right-brain/left-brain, creative-vs. analytics approach, as the industry changes everyone is looking for people who can figure that out. They want people who have at least a general understanding of how to take information and turn it into revenue, however that may be.

MCN: In what other ways are the types of candidates and skill sets that pay TV companies need evolving?

RH: Initially we saw companies saying, “We are digital, and we only want digital experience.” Now they’re taking a step back and looking for blended skills, like a marketing specialist with knowledge of the linear world, the history of TV and digital experience. It’s happening across, sales, marketing and production; they want people who are on top of TV trends and also knows what’s working and what’s not working in digital. We’re seeing a morphing of the two.

MCN: What’s driving the digital/tech demand?

LK: Millennials are not looking at content on traditional TV anymore; they’re watching on any other device you can think of, so on the MSO side, they’re looking at how the viewer of the future will be watching content, and staying ahead of that. Also, with the onset of 4K and virtual reality – and the companies that are integrating those technologies for the B-to-C market – they’re realizing, “If we don’t get a handle on what that product is going to look like to the consumer, we’ll be behind the 8-ball as a cable provider.”

On the programmer side, networks are looking at, "What are we going to distribute, what are viewers watching and what are the platforms we need to be on?” And, “How do we manage those assets in a way that protects IT and IP and gives viewers what they want?"

RH: We still do linear programming candidate searches, but more and more of the demand is in the digital space, and that has changed how we recruit and how the companies are recruiting.

MCN: How so?

RH: Recruiting is a much bigger sales job because they have to lure people in from outside the industry and they’re competing head-to-head with the digital media companies. Finding candidates requires much more targeted outreach, and vetting them takes a lot more time. And when a prospect is really good, they have multiple companies coming after them, so we’re also seeing a lot more of a sales effort: “Let’s fly out your family, show you around, really give you time to know the company.”

MCN: What motivates the digital and tech pros to accept offers, and measured by that, what should pay TV companies do to be more competitive in the digital/tech jobs market?

RH: Sometimes a candidate’s decision comes down to money, and sometimes it’s the title, or the ability to work from home. The tech companies tend to be more flexible, whereas linear TV companies have tended toward having more set HR policies. Pay TV companies have to be flexible and see what they can give and what they can’t – it can be the scope of the job or money or the environment.

LK: Companies should be evaluating the work environment and work culture as part of the recruiting package, looking at how they are positioning not just the job and its progression, but what is this work environment going to look like when the new hire show up? Do they need an office or can they work remotely? They need to be concerned about the look-and-feel of the company and the culture inside.

I think for candidates it’s really 50% compensation and 50% who I work for and what projects I’m working on. That is equally, if not more, important than compensation for these kinds of candidates. Compensation is important but not the driving force of why they take a job – it’s about the innovation and who am I getting behind that could be the next Steve Jobs?

They go to tech startups for the ride, for the upside. Those are much more palatable drivers than bonuses and benefits. That’s a model that cable needs to get its hands around fairly quickly and, from their current cultural environment, it might not be an easy switch.

RH: I was doing a network EVP of programming search, and an OTT provider was courting the same person for a similar position with the title of “director.” The pay was similar, but the programmer had better long-term incentives. But the candidate chose the OTT provider because the environment had that energy and entrepreneurial culture.

And that’s why sometimes it’s hard to compete against the digital tech companies It comes back to the branding piece and whether it’s a brand people are passionate about.

MCN: The 2015 CTHRA Compensation Surveys show both MSOs and programmers increased salaries for key digital and tech jobs last year, and yet they still lag behind digital and tech companies in total compensation across the org chart. What else can they do to seal the deal with an in-demand candidate?

LK: Pay TV companies are lagging behind in total compensation. The digital companies’ compensation model emphasizes total compensation – including bonuses, equity, etc. – while traditional cable companies are still on an older model of focusing on higher base pay instead of variable compensation. It will be interesting to see if that affects their ability to be aggressive because they’re still in transition.

RH: The digital companies can definitely throw more money at people. Pay TV companies are sensitive to wanting to bring talent on board and make them feel well compensated, but when a new SVP is making $50,000 more a year than another who’s been there longer, that’s a problem.

One scripted programmer we worked with realized they were losing people to higher offers, so they spent for the SVP they wanted but then boosted everyone else’s salary as well, and they’ve had great retention. You have to see the value of your team because when you lose people, it costs so much to replace them.

We used to see five-figure sign-on bonuses. Recently I saw a $100,000 sign-on bonus. One company paid for a candidate to relocate and paid for their temporary housing for a year.

MCN: How do MSOs and programmers rate against each other in terms of recruiting in the digital age?

RH: We do a lot more work with programmers and, in general, the programmers have been a little better at it – the message is a little sexier on the programmer side vs. the operator side. But some of the MSOs are getting more forward-thinking. I think Bright House [Networks] has always been forward-thinking with its recruiting.

MCN: How critical is it for pay TV companies to get ahead of the digital/tech recruiting curve?

LK: There’s a lot to be said for what’s going on today with technology at the forefront, but if there’s no content to support, who cares? That’s what’s important on both the MSO and programmer sides. If the studios and cable ops can’t figure out what content works on emerging platforms, it will force the technology companies to start developing their own content for those platforms, and that would really hurt the industry. So they have to step up their game and race to the finish now.

RELATED:Recruiting Tips for TV's Digital Age

As the pay TV industry continues its digital transformation, the makeup of the workforce required to keep it going is taxing recruiting efforts, throwing programmers and distributors into a talent competition that rivals anything on reality TV.

In this competition, job-seekers are the judges and employers are the contestants vying to be given a chance. Social-media specialists, cross-platform content producers, app developers, network engineers, IT security pros, data jockeys and other in-demand candidates are in command of the buzzers in the big black chairs, and pay TV recruiters hit the stage with their acts:

Wanted:Content developer and TV fan passionate about our brand who can create short-form video, post it online, tweet it, put it on Facebook and then parse who’s engaging with it and why.

Wanted:Cloud architect and TV fan passionate about our brand who can create infrastructure required to support future TV Everywhere strategy and interface with Big Data system to parse who’s engaging with TVE apps and why.

TV businesses have an overwhelming need for an elusive candidate who has blended skills across multiple platforms in an environment where the traditional lines between users and IT, production and distribution, even digital and analog platforms, have blurred. Pay TV companies are no longer simply recruiting against each other, but against an insatiable demand for digital and tech pros across all industries, particularly the digital companies they’re increasingly competing against for eyeballs.

Networks and multichannel distributors are trying to fill the same digital and technology roles, requiring the same scarce skills, as a group of companies many simply refer to as “the Googles” — Google, Apple, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon are the most commonly cited — the über-aspirational digital companies for millennials coming into the marketplace.

While pay TV’s digital transformation has been swift and impressive to industry insiders, job seekers from outside the pay TV ecosphere are harder to convince.

“There’s a perception, whether true or not, that we aren’t as far along as we should be,” Renee Hauch, executive vice president of media and entertainment industry recruiter Carlsen Resources, said. “And that has affected the recruiting.”

RELATED:"The Pay in Pay TV," a look at compensation trends in the pay TV industry excerpted from CTHRA's 2015 Compensation Surveys of MSOs and programmers

Turner Sports found that an internship program originally created to give recent college grads, including student-athletes, a break into the sports media business yielded the kind of candidates it needed for wider digital initiatives.

The company designed the program in 2010 as part of its year-round partnership with the NCAA, selecting 10 recent college graduates to cover Turner’s NCAA portfolio. Six years later, the program draws 1,600 applicants, and the current class of 10 interns is working not just on content, but across product management, editorial, video production and marketing, “all with a digital focus,” Turner Sports executive vice president and general manager Matt Hong said.

“While we created the program principally as a way to help individuals break into the sports industry, something that has traditionally been tough to do, it also serves as a beneficial tool to Turner Sports to have a pool of incredible talent from which to fill permanent roles at the end of the internship year,” Hong said. About half of those who complete the program stay on with Turner Sports at the end.

Since then, Turner Sports has created a similar program to support its social media eff orts for its National Basketball Association, NCAA men’s basketball tournament, Major League Baseball, PGA and ELeague assets.

GOING OUTSIDE

“The pay TV industry is pretty small, and people maintain tight-knit relationships,” Chris Barksdale, Scripps’s vice president of human resources, said. “When you start trying to expand beyond our industry, it’s really hard to find someone with the right amount of industry knowledge and a fresh perspective.”

Add to that the tech credentials: Barksdale said Scripps is looking for cloud architects, cybersecurity specialists for “a wholly reimagined team, starting from scratch, to run and build our security going forward,” and developers. “Put anything in front of that, and we need it,” he said, citing content, apps and software developers as examples.

“Our challenge is, we have two voices,” Barksdale said. “We have strong linear TV brands, and that is really helpful in recruiting when we find people who are passionate about those. But we also have a second voice, around technology, and that is a whole brand that I am laser-focused on creating a voice for.”

He’s crafting that voice to counter any notion that an evolving traditional-TV company can’t play in the same sandbox with the Googles: “We play with cool new technologies, and we’re innovative and competitive with Silicon Valley, with great, fulfilling jobs.”

SIDEBAR: Embracing Digital to Fill Digital Jobs

As Scripps Networks Interactive copes with the fact that it’s as much a digital/technology company as a pay TV programmer, its human resources department has one overarching mission: Connect with the right candidate at the right time.

“iOS app developers are not hanging out on LinkedIn,” Chris Barksdale, SNI’s vice president of human resources, said. “You have to go find them in a place where they’re comfortable, like a forum for a technology they trust, and speak to them there. Recruiting for digital talent is a very different proposition now, vs. five to eight years ago.”

In its quest to connect with that talent, Scripps’s HR team is embracing digital tools to fill digital jobs — “technology that connects us to the places that our target candidates are and where we have a chance to define our voice,” Barksdale said.

When you’re recruiting against Google and Netflix, you can’t lose any time. Scripps HR has streamlined the way it recruits candidates, tracks applicants and fills positions by overhauling its backend HR system and giving staff mobile front-end tools.

“All of our stuff is in one system, within the same infrastructure, and it’s all current,” Barksdale said. “I can use it on my phone, my iPad, my laptop, and on each I can do all the things I need to do as an HR manager.”

With a new infrastructure and mobility in place, Barksdale is moving on to phase two: bolting on additional digital tools to maximize recruiters’ reach and efficiency.

“As jobs become harder to fill and we shift the way we look for talent, we need our recruiters to spend more time sourcing candidates and less time on tasks,” Barksdale said.

In an effort to stay ahead of the changing tides of the media business, 30-year-old management consulting and exec recruiting firm the Sucherman Group has launched a rebranding of the company as it opens a new office in the technology and new media hotbed of San Francisco.

In addition to the rebrand (the company isn’t changing its name, but did unveil a new logo), the expansion into San Francisco will complement its base in New York and its office in Los Angeles and represent a shift in the media landscape, which continues to encompass platforms that are altering, if not outright disrupting, the market.

Helping clients develop creative strategies will remain in Sucherman Group’s “roots and our DNA,” but there’s now an increased focus on driving business strategies as well, company CEO Erik Sorenson said.

“We’re really down to the multiplatform business strategy world,” he said, noting that the firm is now looking to “straddle technology with creativity and media business strategy.”

And that’s down to the new logo, designed to represent the “multi-screen, multi-platform world of media consumption,” according to the company.

That revised focus on multiplatform and tech-driven media is also found in Sucherman Group’s client base, which, in recent months, has included Hulu, Fullscreen, Fusion and Machinima, alongside work with Univision Digital, NBCU Digital, WWE and startups such as Rampante and Carpe Society.

Sucherman Group has not yet determined how many of its people will be based at the new office in  San Francisco, but Sorenson expects to be a regular visitor.

“I've been spending a lot of time there [in San Francisco] working out of Starbucks and hotel lobbies and restaurants and other people's offices, so we thought it was high time that we put a flag there.” 

“The Sucherman brand stands for creativity, discretion, integrity and innovation,” Stuart Sucherman, founder and chairman of Sucherman Group, said in a prepared statement. “Our new logo and presence in the Bay Area reflect our awareness that these are the best of times for consumers, and present amazing opportunities for our  traditional and emerging clients.  The changes in the media and entertainment industries are dizzying and our services will be critical as emerging and established companies meet an array of challenges."”