Almost lost amid the recent news of Microsoft’s unprecedented layoffs was a glimmer of hope for technology job seekers: The company is still hiring.

Even as Microsoft lays off up to 5,000 employees from some positions over the next 18 months, it says it plans to hire an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 people in others. Although it needs to cut back on expenses overall, the company says it will keep hiring to support its business strategy in key areas.

Microsoft will “continue to hire in most of the areas it has been investing in, areas such as online services, search and cloud computing, to name a few,” a company representative said in a statement this week. Analysts and outside staffing agencies cited Live Search and the Server & Tools Division as two areas where the company is likely to continue bulking up.

The Server & Tools group is the company’s quiet workhorse, producing steady revenue and profit growth. It’s also a major center of Windows development, as the home of the Windows Server operating system. As a result, it has a larger research-and-development budget than any other Microsoft division — spending more than $1 billion on R&D in the first half of the current fiscal year.

The division is Microsoft’s “bread and butter,” said Tom Taft, co-founder and managing partner of Laurel Group, a Seattle employment firm that provides outside vendors to the division as part of its work with the company. Taft said he expects the company to continue hiring in that area.

[See related post: News Flash: Some tech firms are actually hiring in 2009.]

Live Search is another area where the company will keep hiring, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told analysts during a Jan. 22 conference call.

“We’re going to continue to invest in important areas of opportunity for the company,” Ballmer said. “So even while we take out up to 5,000 jobs, we will also be adding a few thousand jobs back in the areas like search, where we continue to see incredible opportunity to do good work.”

The wild card is the potential for a search partnership with Yahoo. Ballmer has said he is still interested in striking such a deal, and Yahoo’s recent hiring of former Autodesk chief Carol Bartz as its new CEO is seen by some as possibly paving the way for a Microsoft search agreement.

Depending on how Microsoft and Yahoo structure a partnership, or partial acquisition, the positions designated for expanding the Live Search team could end up going to current Yahoo engineers instead.

But one way or another, “search is going to be an area of growth,” said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at the Kirkland-based Directions on Microsoft research firm.

More clues about the company’s hiring plans are contained in job postings added to its employment site in the days following the Jan. 22 layoff announcement.

The listings show that a range of groups are still hiring, albeit very selectively. Positions are available in groups including Windows, Office and Live Search. Available jobs are in marketing and business development, in addition to software engineering and program management jobs.

Overall, however, Rosoff said he expects much of the Microsoft hiring in the coming months to focus on product development rather than sales and marketing.