Apple, the world’s most valuable company with a $2.36 trillion market cap, is pausing hiring due to recession anxieties, CEO Tim Cook said during an interview with “CBS Mornings.”

“What we’re doing as a consequence of being in this period is we’re being very deliberate on our hiring,” Cook said, speaking from Apple’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, the New York Post reports.

“That means we’re continuing to hire, but not everywhere in the company are we hiring,” Cook continued.

Although he did not expand on where Apple is still hiring, last month Apple announced a hiring freeze in all areas of the company except research and development.

Cook alluded to the importance of innovation, saying, “We believe strongly in investing for the long-term. And we don’t believe you can save your way to prosperity. We think you invest your way to it.”

Cook expressed displeasure with Apple’s continuing struggle to get all of its workers back into the office following the COVID lockdowns that became protocols in the past 2-1/2 years:

“If you were here on a Friday, it would be a ghost town,” Cook said. “You collaborate with one another because we believe that one plus one equals three. That takes the serendipity of running into people, and bouncing ideas off, and caring enough to advance your idea, through somebody else because you know that’ll make it a bigger idea.”

According to Apple’s annual report, it had 164,000 workers as of Sept. 24, 2022.