Oracle Corp. has launched a major recruitment drive aimed at boosting its cloud sales force, even as it prepares to make layoffs elsewhere.

The move comes amid a major reorganization of Oracle’s sales teams that began last May. Oracle said in a statement that it’s seeking to hire staff with “a strong sense of personal drive” with between two and six years of work experience, which seems to indicate the company is only interested in hiring fresh-faced talent. It added that it wants to hire 1,000 new employees in total for its Europe, Middle East and Africa region by January 2018.

However, the new hires will likely be offset by layoffs elsewhere in the company. In May it was reported that Oracle was considering making up to two-thirds of its traditional sales staff redundant, in order to replace them with people who have more knowledge of the cloud.

The news comes at a time when Oracle finally seems to be making inroads with its cloud business. The company posted better-than-expected quarterly earnings last month on the back of massive growth in its software as a service and platform as a service businesses. The company reported total cloud revenues of $1.4 billion, up 58 percent from the same period a year ago, prompting Oracle’s co-Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd to proclaim that the company was “clearly the fastest-growing cloud company at scale.”

Cloud-related products now account for more than 12 percent of Oracle’s total sales. The company currently employs about 51,000 staff in the U.S. and 85,000 globally.

On Wednesday, Oracle also announced a major expansion of its Oracle Cloud at Customer service, which now includes its full line of PaaS offerings and most of its major SaaS applications. Oracle Cloud at Customer is essentially a hybrid cloud service, launched last year, that enables customers to choose if they want their data and applications to reside on-premises or in Oracle’s cloud.

Image: Raghu Peethambaran/Flickr