DPG Media's Recruitment Platform, Rebuilt on CQRS and Event Sourcing

Introduction

In the fast-paced world of media, adaptability isn’t just an asset, it’s a necessity. For DPG Media, a media giant in Belgium and the Netherlands, the pressure to evolve was mounting.

For years, DPG's recruitment platform had been built on a monolithic system, where data was stored in one place and processes ran in a rigid, all-or-nothing fashion. But as their needs grew, this approach had become a bottleneck, limiting their ability to scale, innovate, and provide the real-time insights required to stay ahead of the competition.

The Challenge: Rewriting the Rules of Recruitment

Despite being a leader in digital recruitment, their legacy platform, an aging PHP monolith, was beginning to show its limitations. Traffic spikes would slow the system to a crawl. Deployment times stretched into hours. And, worst of all, troubleshooting became a frustrating, time-consuming exercise in guesswork.

Rodrigo Pacheco de Souza, an architect at DPG Media, knew something had to change. “Our legacy system struggled with unexpected surges in updates to the ‘Job’ aggregate,” he recalls. “It slowed down during peak times because it was stuck in full-record storage, with no event history to track what was happening.” What they needed was more than just a tech upgrade. They needed a solution that would make their system more scalable, more transparent, and easier to manage.

The answer, they found, lay in a shift that was as profound as it was strategic: the move to event-driven architecture powered by Axon Framework.

The Solution: A Real-World CQRS Example

DPG Media’s team rebuilt the platform as event-driven microservices, using event sourcing and CQRS with Axon Framework.

"We separated write and read operations, and this allowed us to scale the query side independently, optimize projections for fast queries, and adjust performance without missing a beat.”

- Rodrigo Pacheco de Souza, Architect, DPG Media

It’s a textbook CQRS example: the write side records what happens to each job, while the read side is shaped for fast queries and scales on its own.

DPG Media's platform now handles traffic surges and keeps real-time updates flowing, even at peak usage.

The Result: An Event-Driven Mindset

“The result was significant throughput improvements and reduced latency during peak times,” Rodrigo says..

The bigger change was cultural. Moving from a traditional CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) mindset to an event-driven approach pushed the team to see its data differently: not as static records, but as events that tell a story over time.

“This shift helped shape other departments, like BI,” Rodrigo notes. “Event sourcing provides a clear record of every change.” What started as a way to streamline technical operations became a model for collaboration across the company. “Events use business terms, creating shared understanding between developers, product owners, and stakeholders,” Rodrigo explains.

The Ripple Effect: From Technology to Teamwork

The change didn't stop at the developers' desks. It reached every department at DPG Media.

“Traceability is really important for us. We have events for when jobs are posted, when they are updated, when they need to be removed or suspended, but also on the B2C side when the job vacancies are viewed, when there is apply, an apply start or apply finish.” - Eric de Vries, IT Area Manager, DPG Media

This traceability allowed DPG Media to gain unprecedented visibility into every aspect of their recruitment platform, from job posting to user engagement.

For customer service teams, this clarity proved invaluable. No longer did they rely on fragmented logs and incomplete snapshots to troubleshoot issues. “The development can easily see the event stream and say, ‘Okay, this customer posted this job,’” says Rodrigo. What was once a guessing game became a streamlined process that empowered customer service to resolve issues swiftly and effectively.

Unlocking New Business Opportunities

With real-time data in hand, DPG Media started finding opportunities it hadn't looked for. The data that once sat idle in the system was now a goldmine for new insights and business strategies.

“We’re mining event streams for untapped opportunities—trends, process optimizations—things we never could have imagined before.”

- Rodrigo Pacheco de Souza, Architect, DPG Media

Looking forward, DPG Media is already planning their next steps. “We’re looking at enhancing resilience with Sagas—automating workflows like job matching while ensuring consistency across microservices,” Rodrigo says. And the team is already exploring ways to leverage event streams to identify new opportunities for growth and optimization.

Conclusion: Scaling with Confidence

For DPG Media, moving to event-driven architecture changed more than its tech stack. It changed how teams communicate and how they think about data. DPG Media now runs recruitment on an event-driven backbone it can scale, trace, and keep building on.