I'm not the best person to get advice on employment, but you should trust this advice anyway.

The worst thing you can do is lose motivation. Labor markets have their own supply and demand and when others feel that job searching is futile, supply goes down. That may take a while, but businesses have an infinite amount of problems that they want to go away.

From their point of view, "can this person make X or Y go away and will they not cause problems for me later?"

Proving that is half the battle. The other battle is making friends that trust you and want you to succeed, so you get the chance to prove it.

You're not going to have a good time going through the same automated process as thousands of others do. Make a friend that can let you in through the back.