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.”

The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE), the SCTE Foundation, and Comcast have teamed with and Georgia Tech Professional Education (GTPE) on a pilot training program designed to bring cable telecommunications career opportunities to transitioning members of the armed forces.

They said Comcast has entered into a pilot training partnership with GTPE’s Veterans Education Training and Transition (VET2) program to recruit and train two initial groups of up to 20 participants each for cable telecommunications engineering careers.

The program, they said, is utilizing the training resources of SCTE and its global arm, the International Society of Broadband Experts (ISBE).  Training will be funded by a grant from the SCTE Foundation.

The seven-month process includes student selection and pre-certification, self-paced SCTE/ISBE online training, and an internship that combines academics and practical experience. Up to 40 participants with multiple years of military experience in communications or IT-related areas will be selected.

Initial student screening and pre-certification are being conducted by Georgia Tech Professional Education for service members residing in close proximity to Fort Gordon, Fort Stewart and Warner Robins Air Force Base. Beginning in Q2 2016, students in the first class will complete SCTE/ISBE online training and certification for one of two tracks:  Field Technician, which requires attainment of SCTE/ISBE Broadband Premises Installer (BPI) certification, or Headend Technician, which requires attainment of SCTE/ISBE Broadband TelecomCenter Specialist (BTCS) certification. 

Launched in 2013, VET2 maintains a 100% job offer rate for service members completing the program, they said.

Comcast is using the program to identify, engage and offer training and internship opportunities to high-potential transitioning service members, enabling new career paths for program participants and a source of highly trained individuals for the cable workforce.

“We are thrilled to partner with these respected organizations to connect with military talent early in the transition process,” said Carol Eggert, vice president, military and veteran affairs for Comcast and Brigadier General (R), U.S. Army.  “These highly motivated, talented participants will have the chance to explore exciting career paths in our industry, and we look forward to the opportunity to have them join our team.”

“Georgia Tech has a 130-year history supporting veterans in our community,” added Dr. James Wilburn, director of military academic programs at Georgia Tech Professional Education. “This program brings together a major employer that shares our commitment to veterans, industry-leading technical and workforce education, and the funding needed to streamline that process for participants.”

“Our military veterans represent a deep pool of highly skilled, well-trained talent that would be a tremendous asset to cable,” said Mark Dzuban, president and CEO of SCTE/ISBE.  “Our hat is off to Comcast for working with Georgia Tech Professional Education, the SCTE Foundation and SCTE/ISBE to show how the vast resources of our industry and its training partners can help these dedicated men and women transition their military training to new civilian careers.”

“As consumers depend increasingly on technology for all of their entertainment and communications needs, our need for world-class technical skills is growing,” said Mark Hess, president of the SCTE Foundation and senior vice president, business and industry affairs for Comcast Cable.  “The SCTE Foundation’s support for VET2 will help our industry meet that need while at the same time helping our military men and women to make the transition to civilian careers.”

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.