[0] https://youtu.be/4y0EoVooPIg?si=PzXw3DsNa_mp5dpH&t=26 10 min, time is after the preamble.
Maybe I should do crime, then get the sympathy criminals get? I'm not sure I follow your logic.
People getting out of prison:
* Have an employment gap in their work history
* Are overcoming stigma that makes it difficult for them to get most kinds of jobs
* Have to overcome the catch-22 of trying to find a decent place to sleep while also trying to find money to afford such a place
* Don't generally have a ton of connections for entering the non-criminal workforce
* Often don't have property or other assets coming out of prison
While you don't have a criminal record, and therefore may have to overcome different types of stigma, it sounds like you share all of these. It does sound like you have a place to stay at the moment, and some assets (a laptop?), so in some ways you may be even be able to skip a step or two of the advice that might be in that video.
tl;dr She focused on convincing an employer to try her out on a job with a sales commission, so she could earn money at a multiple of her time, to save as much as she could. She directly invoked sympathy to get the first landlord to take a chance on her. But, she only found someone willing after several months under the somewhat exploitative regime of them insisting she pay for her own background check that - given her history - knew might set them off.
The commission-based job is the insight I gleaned from the video that isn't trite ('keep trying'). You might, nonetheless feel some commiseration of someone who had almost nothing. I also acknowledge that there is survivor bias in pointing at her story, when many other ex-convicts had a harder time that did include homelessness or return to prison.