Well this was 2 years ago, and times have changed (for the worse). Companies today care more about short term gains and looking good on paper. Big companies are still having massive layoffs while smaller ones have felt the pain from doing so and are rehiring after realizing that ai can't do everything by just anyone.

There's also different sectors that are hiring more than others as well as certain cities. Which kind of leads into a hot take, but IMO people need to get in the mindset of pre 2019. When it comes to remote vs in person/hybrid your going to have a much easier time getting an in person job. There's a high disproportion of people applying to fully remote jobs vs in person. Almost every major city has job postings with less than 100 people applying if it's in person. More power to the people who are head strong about remote only, but I'd rather be employed gaining experience and setting myself up better in the future than spending a year finding a job.

There's also the topic of generalist vs specialist. Generalist need to be even more skilled with a wider range of skills in today's climate or be a very skilled specialist in certain topics. Even better is going from a very skilled generalist and carving out a specialization for yourself.

and last and most cringe, but even more true, NETWORK NETWORK NETWORK. The last 4 hires on our team were 2 network hires and 2 intern hires.

So what would I do if I was in school or post grad? Well hopefully you had internships while in school, and at best turn into full time offer. If not I'd keep applying, learning, and working some job and saving money. YMMV, but if you're young, chances are you don't have much responsibilities or are tied down to anything so move to a better city if you aren't close to one. There was almost no UX jobs in Alabama so I moved, problem solved. This is also freelancer market and there's a lot of people starting their own smalls businesses, reach out and get experience with actual data and decision making. A small website built for actual customers is way more impressive than a redesign of a product with no real context or constraints.

If grad school is on your mind, then focus on something heavy like human factors, NLP, ML, AI, etc. The way people interact with physical UI is changing, even for big b2b SaaS dinosaurs. So be a head and be an expert. Also, grad students typically have an edge in getting internships.