Blog / Scrape Glassdoor reviews to improve hiring, boost retention, and make better decisions with ReviewGator’s easy data extraction.
10 September 2025
Attracting and retaining the right talent has never been more difficult. Employees want more than just a paycheck; they want organizations with supportive cultures, career development opportunities, and purposeful work. At the same time, job candidates do their homework on job prospects. In fact, many job seekers conduct searches on relevant employers' names before even applying to find out about the employer culture and plans for the future. The ability to rely solely on aspirational recruitment campaigns is over. Companies must understand how employees and candidates experience their companies.
One of your most valuable sources of information can be reviews on Glassdoor. Glassdoor is a website that enables workers to leave honest reviews about their employers, managers, salaries, and interview experiences. From an employer's perspective, Glassdoor reviews are more than just feedback. These reviews provide strategic insights into the value employees place on a workplace and highlight areas where employers fall short.
While analyzing review data, many companies often find themselves questioning the reliability of their feedback on Glassdoor. With hundreds or thousands of reviews on the site, it's impossible to sort through this overwhelming amount of information. It is where scraping Glassdoor reviews comes into play, using automated scraping tools, which is one way to extract and organize the available data, including pattern matching, benchmarking versus direct competitors, and informing overall recruitment and retention strategy.
This blog will discuss why reviews on Glassdoor should matter, what reviews and data you can scrape from it, how to scrape it, and, most importantly, how to use the insights to improve both your employer brand and employee retention as part of your workforce.
Glassdoor is not just a site for reviews. Glassdoor is a valuable tool for today's job seekers and is a good indicator for employers. Job candidates will use Glassdoor to vet potential workplaces by looking at the reviews and ratings that employees submit before applying. Current employees use it to evaluate their workplace, including the organization, leadership, pay, and culture. Employers use Glassdoor reviews anthropologically to obtain unbiased evaluations of what works and what does not work, as well as to identify issues in their work practices.
There is a vast amount of data on Glassdoor that proves the power and importance of company reviews and ratings for job seekers and employees, with 86% of employees and job seekers looking at these reviews before applying. That is a number where your online employer reputation can be directly correlated to the number of candidates applying for a job at your organization. If every review praised your leader's leadership style, the opportunities for career advancement, and the company's efforts to meet employees' needs, you would have better candidates to choose from when making job offers.
However, if the reviews highlighted varying levels of burnout or described management practices as completely ineffective and inadequate, potential candidates might decide not to apply to that company at all.
Essentially, Glassdoor reviews are a real-time employee survey that you don't have to spend time developing. Each review provides a data point along the spectrum of employee experience. Employee experience is an ethos, a moment of sentiment about the company. Every review contests or celebrates cultural pluses and minuses. Scraping that data gives your organization the ability to see more than just a generalized comment from a given review; you now know the totality surrounding everything.
So, as you can see, Glassdoor reviews are essential to candidates making decisions, and, of course, are necessary for retention rates, organizational reputation, and branding. If you ignore them, indeed, you are not tapping into a valuable competitive advantage within your organization.
Scraping is the automated collection of data from websites into a structured, analyzable format. Instead of reading each review individually, scraping tools absorb a large amount of information in bulk, exporting it into spreadsheets or databases. It means you’ll be able to identify trends, conduct sentiment analysis, and benchmark performance over time.
You can apply scraping to Glassdoor to collect:
When companies have this structured data, they can move beyond anecdotes and see trends. For example, if 60% of the negative reviews mention "limited career growth", HR can flag this as a concern regarding the attraction of advancement opportunities. If the salary is consistently lower than competitor reviews, recruiters can reposition their pay.
The ultimate value of scraping lies in its ability to be done at scale, with speed and efficiency, leading to automated comparative performance responses to improvements. Manual scanning of Glassdoor reviews often focuses on selective outcomes: exceptional positive or scathing negative reviews. Scraping utilizes the entire data point captured, organized, and analyzed.
Glassdoor contains myriad data points, many of which are desirable to HR, talent acquisition, and the C-Suite. The advantage of scraping is having access to these data points in one place and in a consistent manner.
It includes our overall rating and scores on sub-points such as work-life balance, compensation, culture, and leadership. Reviews also help convey levels of satisfaction and the effectiveness of management.
The salary reports available through Glassdoor provide insight into compensation packages and enable us to benchmark against competitors and industry standards. Compensation transparency surrounding pay is now an essential consideration in many job decisions. Many organizations have compensated for this shift by providing more detail on salaries or offering them upfront.
The amount of detail provided on a job candidate's experience (questions asked during the interview, fairness of evaluation, perceived professionalism) will highlight issue areas and aid essential refinement of our interview process.
Compensation is only a piece of monitoring the reviewing process; employees are also concerned with the following benefits: flexibility, healthcare, bullying (or suspected bullying), wellness programs, and diversity. Scraping feedback provides insight into what caused people to apply to our company, but also why they left, and questions surrounding benefits.
These four categories collectively and individually provide a 360-degree perspective on how our company is perceived, and how it compares to others in our industry. The advantages of scraping these variables are to obtain precise, distilled data for analysis, enabling us to make meaningful connections. It will allow us to drive change by investing in key problem areas, addressing less apparent issues, and ultimately providing more positive overall feedback.
Scraping Glassdoor reviews may sound hard, but it is surprisingly simple, especially now with the right tools. Here's a practical guide:
There are many web scraping tools and services out there, such as ReviewGator, Scraping Intelligence, or X-byte. These tools help you approach a website like Glassdoor without needing to learn coding.
Determine what data you want. For example, company reports include reviews, salary information, and interview experiences. Copy and paste the URLs into your tool.
Inform the tool about which fields to scrape. For example, company name, job title, review text, ratings, salary range, or interview difficulty.
Run the scraper. Once it is done, export your findings into a format, such as a CSV or Excel. You can work with the data in BI tools, visualization dashboards, or simple Excel files.
With these steps, businesses can scrape hundreds or thousands of reviews and other metrics in just a matter of minutes. The structured data is then added into a database that can help provide insights into employee sentiment, candidate expectations, and competitive positioning.
Scraping Glassdoor reviews can provide several advantages:
Positive reviews can indicate when you are doing things well, and if you notice a trend of negative reviews, it can show you where you can improve. When able to, leverage both reviews in your recruitment marketing and external communication campaigns.
Determine what's most important to candidates, tweak job descriptions, and enhance the application and interview process. For instance, if candidates frequently cite confusing application processes during interviews, they should clarify these processes to streamline engagement.
Finding signals of unhappiness early is incredibly valuable. If employees in reviews repeatedly mention a lack of management development, opportunities for growth or advancement, or other engagement issues, it is time to explore retention initiatives.
Again, HR leaders can make data-driven changes regarding salaries, workplace policies, or professional development training, rather than adopting a gut-feeling approach.
After you have taken stock of data from your own organization, you can do the same for competitor data. Suppose you have a great understanding of what your competitors are all about. In that case, you can then understand what makes them attractive and figure out where you can create additional leverage to distinguish your employer brand positively.
Ultimately, gathering employee reviews can transform individual voices into valuable strategic insights. As a result, it fosters greater investment in the workplace, which can enhance retention and loyalty.
Scraping reviews is only the first step — where you get value is how you use the data.
Understanding where your employee satisfaction, pay scales, and benefits stand in comparison to competitors can help you establish your organization as a competitor in the employer space in your marketplace.
You can take salary benchmarks and develop competitive offers. You can also continue improving candidate experience through interview reviews, re-evaluating your recruiting process along the way.
Reviewing the same themes emphasized in other employee reviews, such as long hours, lack of advancement, or poor communication, allows you to focus on your pain points.
You can develop job ads and/or careers pages by focusing on the strengths identified in reviews. Responding to feedback on sites like Glassdoor models your behavior for candidates and fosters trust, as they see you value employee feedback and are attentive to their concerns.
Essentially, you can use the data as a prompt for both internal changes (e.g., training your managers, amending/revising company policies) and external positioning (e.g., leveraging the strengths of your culture to potential job seekers). When used responsibly, scraped data can be a springboard for building a workplace that people want to work at and stay working at.
Some companies attempt to manually monitor Glassdoor by reading every review individually. It works for small examples, but quickly becomes impractical for larger companies.
Because of the limitations mentioned above, valuable insights are often missed. There can be continual references to repeated concerns about leadership, culture, or something else, and attracting attention to those samples will likely be missed if a review is not included in the 5-10 reviews someone happens to read as part of their monitoring.
Scraping technology can resolve all of these issues and ensure the processes of capturing and analyzing every review. Structured data solves the hidden patterns problem and makes large volumes manageable while removing human biases.
For organizations committed to employer branding, recruitment, and retention, automating review collection is more than a convenience - it's a necessity.
Utilize scraped data in various human resources and business functions. Some examples of using scraped data include:
If your employees mention that you have a flexible or supportive schedule, highlight this feature in your job posting. If they say a negative aspect of your application process, consider simplifying it to enhance your candidate attraction efforts.
If reviewed comments mention weak benefits, this can help guide HR to negotiate better options in healthcare benefits for their employees, or negotiate a new wellness plan, or implement hybrid work.
Usually, reviews refer to managers not by name but rather by their behaviors. If there are common themes from employees regarding communication gaps (i.e., bad communication), HR should consider leadership development training to address the issue.
Suppose employees express concerns about a lack of inclusive practices that hinder their job applications. In that case, HR should implement DEI initiatives, offer additional sensitivity training, and recruit a more ethnically diverse workforce.
Lastly, you can understand how the sentiment data changes over time. By examining review trends, you can determine whether recent HR policies or initiatives, such as raises, have improved employee sentiment.
These are not theoretical ideas for scraped data; instead, how they are put into action, as seen in the examples above, can enhance employee experience, strengthen culture, and ensure a positive HR reputation, ultimately leading to stronger recruitment and retention.
The evolution of HR will leverage data-informed and data-driven processes. Scraping sites like Glassdoor is just the starting point. The emergence of machine learning, AI, and complex analytics will open great opportunities.
By harnessing machine learning to analyze reviews, organizations can identify roles or departments that are more likely to experience turnover. This enables them to take proactive measures to mitigate it.
Executives will have real-time access to sentiment data, enabling timely intervention on issues emerging from platforms like Glassdoor and others.
NLP (natural language processing) tools can easily capture nuances in employee sentiment, surfacing larger issues beneath surface-level concerns.
New platforms will connect scraping reviews to HRIS data, engagement surveys, and performance data to create a holistic understanding of the workforce.
Organizations that seize these opportunities will be better positioned against their competition in recruitment and retention. By being responsive to the voice of the employee, organizations can attract talent that might otherwise be lost to competitors with better reviews/data visibility, or they may challenge trust.
Scraping reviews on Glassdoor can be very useful, but it can also be painful and time-consuming. ReviewGator takes that pain away by providing automation for all of the collection and analysis of reviews, eliminating fact-finding from many platforms into one clear report. Instead of configuring scrapers on their own, ReviewGator assists businesses in tracking employee sentiment for their teams, competitor trends, and acts as a source of benchmarking for salaries, benefits, and culture.
ReviewGator helps HR leaders identify patterns, enhance staff and recruitment, and maintain retention – all while saving them time. As the talent marketplace continues to be driven by talent, employee feedback is now considered a strategic asset. With ReviewGator, companies can transform reviews into actions, creating a better workplace, attracting top talent, and reducing turnover faster.
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