With the world of higher education opening up and more students qualifying for places in universities and colleges, the number of graduates has dramatically increased. This is great for an educated society, but on the down side, the number of graduates vying for the same jobs has also increased proportionally.

This is the number one reason why finding your dream job, in your dream field, has become so much harder. Supply exceeds demand.

A graduate job agency now needs to sort through hundreds of applications and this has allowed them to be much more selective about what skills and achievements they will deem as suitable criteria. Firstly, as often happens, new graduates do not have the necessary work experience that employers are looking for and while you may look abundantly qualified on paper, it is also understood that in practice, experience often trumps theory.

Secondly, as a fresh graduate, students often lack interviewing skills if they even get to have their CVs read by interested employers. They do not know how to follow up or have not applied correctly in the first place.

Moreover, fresh graduates have not had the time yet to build a successful network of connections or been able to market themselves accurately. Unfortunately, it has also often reported that once graduates have successfully earned their degrees (which they chose as uninformed teenagers) they are no longer even interested in their fields of study, and thus do not have the aptitude that good recruiters would be keeping a keen eye out for.

With the job market being oversaturated with fresh graduates, it is vital that graduates realize that they need to have a holistic approach to their job searches. Everything from their academic results to social media accounts can, and will, be scrutinized. It may not be fair, but actually getting your dream job could very well require absolute perfection in all aspects of your public persona.