Despite a wave of layoffs that paint a gloomy picture of the tech sector, companies are hiring. A lot.

Job postings for tech positions reached nearly 316,000 in March, the highest total in seven months, according to CompTIA’s Tech Jobs Report, issued Friday.

“The headline focus on Big Tech overshadows the enormous base of the tech pyramid,” Tim Herbert, CompTIA’s chief research officer, told MarketWatch. “Tech services, dominated by small and midsize companies, have filled the gap in hiring.”

Companies in the administrative and support, manufacturing and finance and insurance sectors were particularly active, Herbert said.

Tech jobs increased by 197,000 in March and employers stepped up activity for future hiring, running counter to signals that the labor market may be cooling off, according to the analysis by CompTIA, the nonprofit association for the information-technology industry and workforce.

However, CompTIA’s report did show that tech-sector employment — all workers on the payrolls of tech companies — declined by 839 jobs in March amid a wave of layoffs from the likes of Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL, +3.78% GOOG, +3.76% Google, Salesforce Inc. CRM, -1.41%, Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. META, +2.18%, Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +2.55%, Intel Corp. INTC, -0.06% and others.

“Big Tech is still ahead in employment numbers because they hired so many people over the last year or so,” Herbert said. “Now they need to signal to the market that they are cost-efficient and are improving profit margins.”

The overall U.S. new jobs report showed 236,000 additions in March and a drop in unemployment to a historic low of 3.5%.

Read the full report here