The unemployment rate in Feb 2020 was 3.5%; by April 2020 it was up to 14%. It has never been lower than 3.5% since then. If there was a hiring glut due to covid it must have been a very industry-specific glut.

It definitely was industry specific. The need to satisfy a boom in remote working and people bored out of their minds in quarantine drove a ton of hiring in tech. If you had money to invest, tech stocks and companies were among the few places it made sense to pour money into during the pandemic.

There have been several front-page posts on HN in the past few weeks about big name company CEOs apologizing for massively over hiring during the pandemic not realizing that it wouldn't pay off once the lockdowns ended and people decided to go back to living their normal lives again.