I graduated in the dot com bust of 2001. It took me over a year and a half to get something permanent. The usual excuse was "no experience" but how are you to get experience if no one will try you out?
Two things I found that helped.
A lot of big companied have more involved interview process. Filling out forms with a lot of questions like "give an example of when you showed leadership" or "overcame a difficult situation" and other such BS. It took a lot longer to fill out those forms than sending out a CV and cover letter. But it did result in a greater chance of getting an interview. Keep a note of the answers to the questions as once you have done a few, you can usually tweak and reuse the answers in other application forms and it gradually becomes less and less effort.
Second thing that really seemed to make a difference was doing some temporary work. First was manual some testing for a company (pretty boring, but I did create a small Access database to log issues). The second was a bit more interesting Visual Basic work, but paid pretty much minimum wage.
Even after that it took a while, but having some experience on my CV worked a lot better than having none. I reluctantly had to change location to where the majority of jobs were - close to London.
Having your personal project available is good, but it is a game. Maybe look at producing something more business oriented. Databases might seem boring, but they pay the bills.
Two things I found that helped.
A lot of big companied have more involved interview process. Filling out forms with a lot of questions like "give an example of when you showed leadership" or "overcame a difficult situation" and other such BS. It took a lot longer to fill out those forms than sending out a CV and cover letter. But it did result in a greater chance of getting an interview. Keep a note of the answers to the questions as once you have done a few, you can usually tweak and reuse the answers in other application forms and it gradually becomes less and less effort.
Second thing that really seemed to make a difference was doing some temporary work. First was manual some testing for a company (pretty boring, but I did create a small Access database to log issues). The second was a bit more interesting Visual Basic work, but paid pretty much minimum wage.
Even after that it took a while, but having some experience on my CV worked a lot better than having none. I reluctantly had to change location to where the majority of jobs were - close to London.
Having your personal project available is good, but it is a game. Maybe look at producing something more business oriented. Databases might seem boring, but they pay the bills.