My phone rings. It’s Spring of last year, and “unknown number” appears on the caller-ID. While most people associate that with a telemarketer, I’ve come to know it as the calling card of Skype. It’s an international call I’ve been waiting for a week to receive. I take a deep breath and answer the phone.

“Hi John, it’s _______, and I just wanted to follow up with you on your interview last week.” It’s the woman who interviewed me via videoconference from Minnesota, and she was calling about the job for which I was a finalist — the job that, judging by the tone of her voice, I was about to get rejected for. She spent fifteen minutes on the phone explaining what a great candidate I’d been and why they were going in another direction, she urged me to apply again in the future, and left me thanking her from the rejection call. Being rejected was painful, but her professional demeanor left me feeling positive about the experience and genuinely willing to apply again.

But that story is hardly the norm. For the past two years I’ve become somewhat of an expert on the job-hunting process, casting a wide, intercontinental net and applying not for one specific kind of job, but for whatever interests me. Living abroad and working hourly-wage jobs like the one I have now gives me the ability to apply only for jobs I really want, as opposed to the desperation of job hunting when I’m unemployed. Some jobs I’ve gotten (like the tour guide job I start in March or the TV show I’m working on). Some jobs I haven’t (keep reading). Two years of this means I’ve applied for plenty of jobs, and I’ve learned an important thing about the hiring process: There’s a way to conduct interviews for your job opening, and there’s a way not to.

Since last September, I’ve been applying for a job as a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. State Department. It’s a highly competitive interview process for a job that would’ve taken me to one of the 285 U.S. diplomatic missions located abroad to work in a series of two-year posts. I applied to take a test, studied intensively for a month, visited the US embassy in London to take the test, passed it (no small feat considering its failure rate: 80%) and was invited to write a series of “personal narrative” essays, As you can see in the letter at the top of the post, I found out this week that I didn’t get the job. Throughout the three months and roughly 60 hours I put into the application, I never dealt with a human, simply the automated bot operated by the folks at ACT.

My American friend here in Cardiff finished her graduate degree last spring, and since then has moved in with her boyfriend and began job hunting. She has a visa to work in the country for two more years, and she’s been up front about about that fact as she’s applied for jobs across the U.K. She’s been invited to interview by phone, and then in person by a few prospective employers, but invariably, after investing countless hours of preparation and mental energy on the interview process, she gets the same answer: “We’re not able to hire someone with a fixed-term visa.”

It’s last March, and I’m going stir-crazy in my not-so-glamorous retail job in Galway. Following advice from the oh-so-helpful Gary from Prosperity, a tech recruiting firm based in Dublin, I crowdsourced my job hunt. One of the emails I received as a result of that blog postwas from an employee at Yahoo!’s Dublin office. They were hiring a few “ISO Search Creative Advisors”, and based on my CV, he thought I’d make a great fit. So I applied and one cover letter, one phone interview, one three-hour bus trip to Dublin and 2.5 hour in-person interview later, I sat at home, waiting for the call. The call never came. Neither did the email. In fact, after two months, two follow-up emails and a follow-up phone call Yahoo! never got back to me with a decision. To their credit, they weren’t unresponsive. The HR manager just kept running out the clock with “No decision has been made yet”-type emails. Ten months later, I’ve yet to receive a definitive answer from Yahoo!.

The Great Recession has made landing a job even more difficult than it already was. New positions are flooded with applications within hours of a job posting, and I’m sympathetic to the challenge that creates for HR managers. But that challenge doesn’t excuse them from acting ethically. If you’ve asked a me to spend my time and money to come to your location, I have a few expectations: Don’t invite me unless it’s within the realm of possibility that you could hire me. Give me a contact email of a real person (instead of a robot) and for the love of god, let me know if you’re not giving me the job.