..."We talk to a lot of people in the graduate recruitment industry and they all say the same thing," Ben Reeves of the Australian Association of Graduate Employers. said. "The spelling is substandard, the grammar is not very good and at times the correspondence can be a bit familiar."

Annabelle Puddy, the national head of recruiting for Accenture, said it was a particular problem among students who had studied for a technical degree such as software engineering.

"We're absolutely dumbfounded at the amount of students who use very relaxed [language], as though they're communicating with their friends on text messaging or email, so everything's abbreviated in their applications," she said."