Project / 01
Krauss Kommunikation · Professional / client platform
Recruitment Platform Modernisation
A complete rebuild of a long-running recruitment platform, replacing a fragmented multi-WordPress architecture with a single Laravel application while preserving functionality, integrations and user experience.
- Role
- Technical Lead / Software Engineer
- Context
- Professional / client platform
- Stack
- Laravel, PHP, Livewire, MySQL
- Year
- 2023-present
- Status
- Live
- Scale
- 2,000+ listings · 40,000+ applications · 7M+ tracked interactions
Case study
Context
The recruitment platform started around seven years earlier as a much smaller WordPress-based product for a specialized job market.
Customers could create accounts, publish job listings and distribute them to multiple channels, including the platform itself, the German Federal Employment Agency, a major commercial job platform and Google for Jobs via structured data.
Over time, the system grew into multiple interconnected WordPress installations with increasing technical debt while the user-facing design and workflows remained well received.
Problem
Core functionality was spread across several WordPress installations, integrations relied on custom cross-system communication and the architecture constrained further development.
Performance and stability issues increased operational risk, while migration had to preserve an established live product with thousands of active listings, historical applications and tracking data.
The objective was not a redesign, but a full technical rebuild that preserved user-facing behavior and existing workflows.
Approach
I led the rebuild of the platform as a single Laravel application with Livewire, consolidating distributed behavior into one maintainable monolith with conventional framework structure.
Development ran in parallel to the live legacy system while features were recreated step by step, including account management, listings, applications and external publishing integrations.
The existing visual design and interaction model were intentionally preserved so migration focused on technical quality and reliability rather than product retraining.
Key Decisions
-
Preserve the product, replace the foundation
Kept the familiar design and workflows while replacing the underlying architecture, reducing migration risk and keeping focus on maintainability and performance.
-
Consolidate into a Laravel monolith
Moved from distributed multi-WordPress behavior to one Laravel application to simplify ownership, data access and onboarding for future developers.
-
Validate with production-scale data early
Imported and tested representative production data before cutover to surface migration and scaling issues in advance.
Migration
Final migration was executed in an overnight window with temporary read-only mode for administrative workflows to minimize disruption.
The cutover included 2,000+ active job listings, 40,000+ applications and more than 7 million tracked interactions while preserving relationships and historical continuity.
Applicants experienced no user-facing downtime. After migration and validation, traffic was switched to the new Laravel platform without prolonged dual-production operation or rollback.
External integrations
Existing job distribution integrations were recreated and modernized so recruiters could continue publishing through familiar workflows.
Structured data and SEO output for listings were improved to strengthen search engine job indexing support after the rebuild.
Metrics
- Active job listings
- 2,000+
- Applications
- 40,000+
- Tracked interactions
- 7M+
- Applicant-facing downtime
- 0
Listings migrated during cutover while preserving platform functionality.
Historical application data migrated to the new system.
Behavior and analytics-related tracking data preserved through migration.
No user-facing interruption for job applicants during production cutover.
Outcome
The fragmented legacy architecture was replaced by a single maintainable Laravel codebase that has operated reliably since migration.
Performance improved and feature development became substantially more straightforward because teams no longer work around custom multi-system WordPress behavior.
Developer onboarding is now faster due to familiar framework conventions and clearer system boundaries.
Highlighted Outcome
A multi-system legacy platform with years of production data was migrated to a completely new Laravel application with 0 applicant-facing downtime.