It also depends on what field your PhD is in. The ones who are more hireable are sometimes surprising. English and history PhDs will often find non-academic jobs which are at least as well paying as academic jobs. But yes, art and art history, linguistics with focus on some languages, and some biological sciences fields are hard to sell outside of academia.
That being said, many academic have a difficult time finding non-academic jobs, because they really do not know how to sell their qualifications, and often do not know how to go about a non-academic job search.
Some of the reasons for that are
A, in the academic job search, there is the implicit assumption that the applicant has all of the skills which are considered valuable by employers (including those outside academia). So academics are not used to providing a list of skills, such as writing, analysis, familiarity with the most used software and platforms, etc. They are submitting applications which do not provide employers with the information they (the employers) need in order to know whether the applicant has the required skills for the job.
They are also used to listing the articles produced by a student or the amount of money they got on a grant, and assuming that their employer knows what skills went into those accomplishments. Academic CVs do not include what these entailed, nor do they state what job-related skills these accomplishments demonstrated.
B, academic applications are expected to focus on why the place of employment is such a great place for the employee, and it is considered bad form to “boast” too much about accomplishments. You write your publications, your grants, and the classes you taught. So academics are also not used to writing how great they are, and what great things they will bring to the employer, or, if they do, they don’t do a good job.
C, the academic job search is often about selling the ideas that the candidate has, “see what great ideas I have for research/teaching”. That isn’t something that works outside of academia.
D, academic jobs are generally very narrowly focussed, especially in the fields which have the largest numbers of PhDs without jobs. The university is looking for an expert in Medieval Romance Languages, so they won’t really look at people with expertise in Medieval Germanic languages. That means that academics will overlook jobs for which they are qualified, since they “only” have 75% of the qualifications. Theya re also pretty weak at writing why they do qualify for these jobs, or for jobs which are not related to the expertise.
Personally, I had a lot more success in landing interviews and job offers outside of academia than I ever had in academia.