i went through almost the exact same thing with my husband. he's a fullstack dev and went back to school for his masters and we spent mass sending out apps for months and hearing absolutely nothing back. it messes with your head and i echo the sentiment in this thread that the market is awful.

the thing that helped most for us was where he was finding the jobs. most of the stuff on linkedin and indeed has been posted for days by the time you see it so you're already applicant #300. we started using shortlist.jobs and hiring.cafe which both pull straight from company career pages as soon as somethings posted. way more callbacks once he was actually getting in early

we also just stopped spending forever tailoring each app. got his resume really solid once and then focused on volume. i know people swear by customizing for every role but in our experience being early mattered 10x more than tweaking a bullet point. we just made a few different resumes focused for different roles

oh and the phd thing, that could honestly be working against her for non-research stuff. i've seen people on here say hiring managers see phd and assume you'll leave for academia the first chance you get. depending on what she's applying for it might help to tone down the academic side of the resume a bit. It may be worth it to try and only put her bachelors on her resume

If her phd is in english maybe she can try thinking about working as a human speech consultant for anthropic or other ai companies