The pre-draft process has dramatically changed in recent years. One critical aspect of it now includes a full and complete preemptive scrubbing of the prospects’ social-media accounts.
And for good reason. Consider this quote from Jay Glazer’s latest Q&A with TheAthletic.com: “I was in a General Manager’s office two years ago, he said, ‘Jay, you’ve got to see this.’ This kid said the dumbest stuff you could ever imagine on social media. I’m not going to repeat the language he was using, but they were kind of laughing, saying, “Well, this dipsh-t’s off our board.”
Teams, as Glazer notes, now hire firms to scour the social-media accounts of all prospects “over the last 10 years.”
Based on when the process starts, there’s a good chance that teams know the contents of social-media accounts long before the prospect realizes that he should remove the information.
Which leads back to a fundamental point that everyone needs to realize, from the moment that first social-media account is created to the time that first job application is completed: Anything you say can and will be used against you, sooner or later.
