I have "Considered" stealing from my employer several times. When I was 15 I was a refugee and worked in a Radio-Shack-like store in Croatia. We built PCs in back and sold them in the front. The front and back were separated by a curtain, and highest value items (ram sticks) happened to be stashed on the shelf on the side of the entrance. I realized it would take literally 5 seconds for a customer to reach through the curtain and grab them. That got me thinking on whether as an insider I would have higher or lower risk than a random customer. How could I reduce the risk? What's a simple, non-overly-elaborate method that would let me accomplish this? So I did spend some time considering this problem space (and then next day suggested to my boss to move the RAM further inside:)
Similarly with suicide. Everybody's life is hard and has ups and downs. I've "considered" suicide in several different ways many times in my life, sometimes at "obvious" times of hardship, otherwise at simply slow, boring times. I'm largely a cheerful optimistic person FWIW, but I find everything interesting even fascinating, including that particular life (ending) choice.
Talking to couple of my closest oldest friends, who are most similar to me, they have few mental taboos. But talking to most other people, at least as far as they're willing to be honest with me and/or themselves, they have never considered SO MANY topics, virtually regardless of how light or heavy we define the word.
When I was working at IBM, a my manager introduced me in passing to one of his peers who was getting a huge promotion, about three levels up. Why such an unusual promotion? He'd noticed a way that 4 people could conspire to exfiltrate $25 million on a Friday and be in some non-extradition country before it was noticed. He had reported this flaw, and they were promoting him for alerting them. He had certainly "considered" quite deeply stealing from his employer, and was being rewarded for doing the right thing.
And, of course, an honest answer on his BestBuy app would have disqualified him.
We can quibble about the meaning, but this is an absolute fail on the job application, unless the goal is to filter out intelligent people who have naturally curious minds.
There is a huge difference between thinking about something and taking action to do it. You have brought us another great example of utter cluelessness in corporate HR.
Not sure why you think this is a crazy goal for a retail job. If you can't figure out that you should say "no" to the stealing question, no matter what the truth is, then you're probably not a good fit to work retail.
In fact, I'd bet that most of the "yes" answers to this question are people who are curious but have poor social understanding. I imagine that someone who really would steal is also dishonest enough to lie on the question.
Bingo!
I do expect that there are attempts to filter out overly intelligent people for some jobs. There was a lawsuit in Connecticut by an applicant who scored too high on the police exam and was denied a job. He lost the case, and established the right for police to reject people for being too smart as they might get bored or something (sorry, I don't have a link on hand).
But, as you point out, this question filters out only the honest and intelligent people.
It leaves you with the pool of people who are either dull or dishonest. Classic HR fail.
Looks like the reason is: we refuse all smart people equally and it's a means to reduce turnover...
What a joke.
(and yes, if you're reasonably sharp and not a super-stickler, you should be able to suss out the screening intent of the question, constrain the current meaning of "consider", and answer "No" regardless of your previous thoughts and understanding of the word — it's not like thoughtcrime is prosecutable ...yet)
The problem is not the interpretation of a word. The problem is how the ocean of other people answered this question. There comes a point when being honest is completely stupid, and when most people use the word honesty they don’t mean to cross into the completely stupid territory.
That being said I’d consider such a person to be a fine candidate for friendship.
No one is completely honest. Courtesy is the art of lying.
“Have I deliberated over whether or not to do this?”
Not:
“Have I thought, in the abstract, about how I might do this, or what it might be like?”