In the past five months James Scheck has had only three job interviews. The last one is etched on his mind. It was for a junior sales role at 5G, a telecoms company in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. A few minutes into the interview, he was asked to sing a song. Instead of running for the door, he closed his eyes and belted out the first verse of Wonderwall by Oasis.

When Scheck, 23, started his economics degree at Manchester University more than three years ago this was not what he had in mind. He doesn’t want to work in sales but after failing to get into banking, he has expanded his search. Despite his rendition of Wonderwall, he did not get the job but nor has he ruled out singing at future interviews.

Scheck is not the only graduate doing extraordinary things in his quest for work. In September David Rowe, 24, walked up and down Fleet Street, London, for five days wearing a sandwich board advertising his eagerness to work. Gemma James, who graduated this year, spent £300 posting her CV on a billboard in Victoria station for two weeks. Another graduate stood on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, from where he hung a giant version of his CV.

This may sound like students larking around but the reality is deadly serious. Some 300,000 new graduates entered the market this summer and thousands of them are still jobless.

According to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), 70,000 graduates (between the ages of 18-24) were unemployed in April. This number does not take into account this year’s crop and there are fears that it could rise above 100,000 when the ONS publishes its labour report on Wednesday. Much more worrying is the prospect of the total number of unemployed young people breaking 1m.

David Blanchflower, an economist and former Bank of England rate-setter, is calling this a “national crisis”.

“Two groups have been affected in this recession,” he said. “One is those that made foolish decisions and bought houses and racked up debt. I don’t feel sorry for them. The other group is the young. They did all the right things. They paid for their degrees and now they have come out into the big world and there are no jobs for them.”

To gain an insight into just how dismal the market is and the effect it is having on young people, The Sunday Times will follow six graduates for the next 12 months. They come from different backgrounds, universities and degrees but they are united by one common goal: to find a job.

In some cases, any job will do. Others are holding out for a “proper” job. They blame the recession but it is not the only factor. They all recognise that there are simply too many graduates in the job market and some are even questioning whether they should have bothered going to university.

Duncan Stevenson graduated with a first-class degree in multimedia technology from Brunel University. The 22-year-old wants to work as a digital designer. He was thrilled with his grades but after five months of fruitless job-seeking, he is wondering whether it was worth it.

“I have come back from uni to find people who didn’t get a degree in really good jobs,” he said. One of his former schoolmates has worked his way from being a cashier at Tesco to manager of a section. Another friend has an IT support role at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham.

Like most of the graduates, Stevenson has moved home. He has done about 150 hours of freelance work for digital design agencies in Cheltenham and applied for 50 jobs. He has had only two job interviews so far — both were unsuccessful.

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