A man comes to me and asks if I can help him with his online job application. He says the lady told him he has the job if he will just fill out the application. He was trying to do it on his government phone and was having trouble. Imagine what this is like trying to fill out an application on a phone.

You go to the website. Look for “careers.” Put in the zip code of the location you want to work. It brings up available positions. Manager. Stocker. Maintenance. Cashier. He says, “The guy who unloads trucks.” We choose “Stocker.” Then you have to create an account. “Do you have an email address?” “Can you access that email address?”

Our folks have countless email addresses, because they lose their phone or their phone gets stolen. (Phones are a currency on the street.) When they get a new phone they can’t remember what their email and password was, so they create a new one.

We figure out what email address to use. Then we have to create a password. Will he remember this password to be able to get back into this account? Will he know how to do it?

We finally get to the application and he starts entering his personal info. I tell him he can use Joe's Addiction's address. He hands the phone to me to type because his fingers are too big and he keeps making mistakes. He is frustrated. You know this problem, right?

After answering the questions about personal work history (which he just makes up the dates for because he doesn’t remember what year he worked when), next comes an assessment test.

Here are some examples of questions on this test:

1. Question

You are serving a customer at the store when your colleague interrupts and says that a customer is on the phone asking to speak with you specifically. What would be the least effective response to this situation?

*Ask your colleague to help the customer on the phone and continue serving the customer in the store.

*Ask your colleague to help the customer in the store and go answer the phone.

*Excuse yourself, answer the phone and ask the customer if you can call them back.

*Excuse yourself and ask your customer to wait; answer the phone and help the customer who called, and only then return to the customer in the store.

2. Question

You observe a coworker stealing a package of toilet paper and putting it in their own bag. Do you…

*Confront your coworker and tell them it’s not okay to steal.

*Tell your manager you what you saw.

*Do nothing. It is not your business.

*Buy a package of toilet paper and give it to your coworker, hoping they get the message.

Do you know the right answers to these questions?

Imagine living in prison or street culture where everyone fends for themselves and lives in fight-or-flight-survival-mode 24/7.

“Snitches get stitches.”

"Keep your head down. Mind your own business."

The test has 65 questions and many of them are worded like the first one here, in the negative. “What should you not do?” or “Which of these would be the most unhelpful?”

Once, I was helping a man to take this kind of test for a job at Home Depot. I read the questions and answers out loud to him, hoping that hearing it aloud would help him recognize the reverse aspect of some of the questions. After pausing a long while, he said, “I think they’re trying to trick me.”

Yes. Yes, they are.

Recently, one of our young people announced very excitedly that she got a job at Walmart! I was thrilled for her. She said, “I took that damn test four times and couldn’t pass it, but this time I found a website with the answers to the test.” She grinned from ear to ear.

People have to cheat to make it through the application process for a job at Walmart.

Imagine what it feels like for a grown man to have to ask me for help filling out a job application.

Why don’t “they” just get a job?