Not too surprising

Different sectors are impacted differently. You can hire burger-flippers and salesfolk when you need them. Building company infrastructure and doing product R & D has a longer lead time so you need to hire up the IT etc staff now. As business confidence builds, companies want to rebuild ready for mainstream improvements that might still be quite a few months away.

Any company sitting on a cash mountain would have seen the recession as a great opportunity to keep up R&D spending and improving their position while their competitors had to cut staff and fall behind.