What to research, and what to skip
Memorising the founding year impresses nobody. Four things are worth an hour; the rest is trivia.
Candidates over-research the wrong layer. They learn the founding year, the CEO's name, and the mission statement — facts that are on the homepage, that everyone else also read, and that never once change an interviewer's mind. Meanwhile they cannot say what the company actually sells, or who it loses customers to.
1. What they sell, and to whom
In one sentence: what does this company charge money for, and who pays? If it is a bank, which segment — retail, SME, corporate? If it is a platform, which side subsidises the other? You should be able to answer this without hedging, because every strategic question in the interview sits on top of it.
2. What changed in the last year
Funding rounds, a new market, a regulatory shift, a launch, a leadership change, a layoff. Two or three specifics from the last twelve months are enough. This is the layer that makes a question sound informed rather than rehearsed — "you moved into the UAE last spring; is this role part of that, or the Saudi side?"
3. Who they compete with
Name two or three, and know roughly what distinguishes them. Interviewers notice immediately when a candidate can place the company in a market instead of treating it as the only company in the world.
4. The team you would join
Look up your interviewers and the people whose titles sit around the role. How large is the function? Is it new or established? Did the person you would replace get promoted, or leave? You will not always find out, but the question is worth carrying into the room.
Where to look
- The careers page and the job description itself — read it twice; the phrasing tells you which problem they are actually hiring against.
- Recent news and local business press, in Arabic as well as English; regional coverage often carries detail the English write-up leaves out.
- The product itself. Sign up, open the app, read the pricing page. Fifteen minutes of using the thing beats an hour of reading about it.
- Employee reviews, read sceptically — treat them as a list of questions to verify, not as findings.
The goal is not to prove you did homework. It is to ask a question only someone who did homework could ask.