Like most people, I was shocked to see the figures on youth unemployment this week (apparently one in six are now out of a job). And based on my experiences of the last week, there’s more to this problem than the recession.

On Monday, I put up a job advert for someone to replace that idiot analyst of mine who’s decided to go back to university. It’s a decent role but a fairly junior one – I just want a smart grad with a bit of initiative who can turn his/ her hand to different things and develop fast. So nothing too complicated. And since everyone keeps telling me that graduates are finding it impossible to get jobs at the moment, I figured I’d be drowning in brilliant applications. Unfortunately, so far it hasn’t quite worked out like that (maybe all the good ones are still out in Ayia Napa or something, if that’s not a contradiction in terms). We’ve had about 50 people apply, and most of them have been rubbish.

But I don’t mind that so much – that’s par for the course when you run an ad like this. What particularly shocked me was how illiterate some of these people were. I’m not sure I’ve had a single application without some kind of glaring spelling or grammar mistake – normally just after they tell you how brilliant they are at spelling and grammar. (I even had one student journalist boasting about her skills at ‘profreading’, which wasn’t very bright.)

I’m conscious that I’m starting to sound like your Gran now, and I’m really not the kind of person who likes to moan about how feckless young people are. I was one quite recently, after all, as were most of the people that work for me. And when you see these kids in enterprise and business competitions, coming up with all these great new ideas, you know the future isn’t quite as bleak as the Daily Express and co would have us believe.

But one thing I’ve definitely found, even in my very short experience, is that the standard of applications seems to get worse every year. I don’t know why – whether it’s the schools, texts and emails, reality TV – but I swear that people are finding it harder and harder to string a sentence together. I’m not expecting Hemingway, but I’d never dream of sending off a job application that’s riddled with typos and mistakes.

And I think the problem’s actually bigger than that. Most graduates these days seem totally ill-equipped for the world of work. We almost always have a three-month period where they’re just absolutely hopeless, until they finally settle down and start getting the hang of it.  So if the Government had any sense (a big if, I know), they’d be spending their money helping schools and universities make kids more employable – CV classes, financial literacy, business competitions, negotiation training, that kind of thing. Otherwise I don’t think the problem is going to go away when the recession does.