[D] Struggling on the NLP job market as a final-year PhD , looking for advice

I’m a final-year PhD student in the U.S. working primarily on NLP. I’ve been on the job market this year (since October), and I’m trying to understand where I might be going wrong.

My priority was academia, but after submitting 30 tenure-track applications, I’ve heard nothing but crickets.

I also applied for industry roles:
~200 applications → 8 interviews, no offers.

My research profile:
17 peer-reviewed papers and 1 pre-print, ~13 first-author, about 8 in A/A* ACLvenues (rest are workshops), ~430 citations. I’ve also completed internships at well-known companies and published work from them, but that didn’t convert into return offers.

In interviews, I often run into one of two issues:

• My research area is seen as too narrow or outdated (summarization) or not aligned with what the team currently needs, or
• The process becomes heavily LeetCode/SWE-style, which is not my strongest area.

I’m trying to figure out what I should be doing differently.

For industry roles:

• What skills should I be improving that hiring managers are actually looking for? More LeetCode? Implementing ML algorithms from scratch?

For postdoc opportunities:

• Should I start cold-emailing professors directly about postdocs (I’m defending in four months)?