Meta has finished its latest round of layoffs, with “dozens” of employees in program management, marketing, and enterprise engineering reportedly cut. Since last year, the social-media giant has slashed roughly 21,000 jobs, according to levels.fyi.

A new Reuters report also breaks down how the company is continuing to not only spend billions of dollars on the “metaverse,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s term for a virtual reality (VR) ecosystem, but also invest heavily in artificial intelligence (A.I.). On both fronts, the company faces intense competition from a variety of well-financed rivals, including Apple, Microsoft, and Google.

Faced with those pressures, it makes sense that Meta would figure out how to cut costs in any way it can. During the recent layoff rounds, the company has reportedly targeted managers in an effort to “flatten” its corporate structure and make its operations more efficient. Some of its storied in-office perks, including dry cleaning and free dinners, have either been cut or reduced in some way.

But at some point, Meta will need to begin hiring again, because it needs highly specialized talent to carry out its strategies. Even now, reports suggest that salaries for VR developers at Meta can hit more than a million dollars per year. It’s a similar situation at companies like Google and Microsoft that have likewise slashed jobs over the past 12 months—while much of Big Tech is going through a sizable adjustment, it also has an insatiable hunger for talent over the long term.

Meanwhile, the tech unemployment rate climbed slightly to 2.3 percent in April, according to a new analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data by CompTIA. The broader tech sector gained roughly 18,795 positions, which CompTIA claimed was the “largest volume of monthly hiring since August 2022.” Employers still need data scientists, experts in A.I. and machine learning, and other specialists who can drive their strategies.