Arc Brand Guidelines: The Remote Hiring Platform From the Team Behind Codementor

A live-help site for coders came first.

Arc did not start from nothing. Its founder and chief executive, Weiting Liu, first built Codementor, a site that connects software developers with mentors for live, one-to-one help. In an interview published by Owl Labs on 29 August 2019, Liu said he had started his first company, Social Picks, in 2006 as part of Y Combinator, and that he launched Codementor in 2014 as part of the Techstars accelerator in Seattle, seeing a gap in “connecting developers around the world with live mentorship opportunities.”

Arc grew out of that business. In the same 2019 interview, Liu said the idea came from a simple observation — that “great talent is global, but for most organizations, hiring is still local” — and that most remote hiring services were still focused on short-term freelancers rather than full-time remote jobs. He described Arc as a platform to help businesses hire remote engineers and teams, and said the company was seeing steady growth in applications to both Arc and the Codementor marketplace.

The launch year is given by Liu himself. Speaking to TechCrunch in May 2023, he referred to “Arc’s launch in 2019”; TechCrunch described him as Arc’s founder and chief executive who “also launched Codementor,” which it called a remote learning platform for software developers. The two brands still sit side by side: Arc’s own about page lists Arc, for employers hiring for remote jobs, and Codementor, for finding a mentor in real time.

The company’s base has been both a place and no place. In 2019 Liu told Owl Labs that Arc had a hybrid set-up, with a co-located team at its Taiwan headquarters and about a tenth of its staff working fully remotely from countries including Mexico, Canada and Singapore, while he split his own time between Taiwan and the San Francisco Bay Area. Arc now describes itself as a distributed team spanning 12 countries.

Vetted remote talent, then an AI recruiter.

Arc presents itself as a remote career platform working for both sides of a hire: it helps developers prepare for and find remote jobs, and it helps organisations hire remotely. Its mission, as the about page puts it, is “to help people build amazing remote careers from anywhere.” In 2019 Liu told Owl Labs that developers from many countries apply to its network but only a small share pass its vetting, which includes interviews with senior engineers to judge communication as well as technical skill.

The platform has widened beyond code. Arc’s website now offers freelance and full-time hires across developers, designers, marketers, product managers, project managers and assistants, and says it has access to 450,000 people in 190 countries; it advertises the “top 2%” of talent and says freelancers can be hired within days and full-time staff within weeks. Those are the company’s own figures and claims.

The most fully reported product step came in May 2023. TechCrunch reported on 24 May 2023 that Arc had launched HireAI, a tool powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 that does much of the manual work of finding candidates from the 250,000 developers then on Arc, including résumé screening and mass outreach. Companies upload a job description and receive a shortlist, refined with each match. Before HireAI, the article said, employers filled in a detailed job form and Arc used its own matching algorithm, with the platform’s recruiters curating candidates. Liu told the publication that such tools were not meant to replace human recruiters entirely, and that HireAI could be used alongside manual screening or switched off.

Arc also publishes a large free library for both audiences: salary and rate explorers for remote developers, job description templates, interview questions, team-bonding guides, a résumé builder and separate blogs for employers and for talent.

Design and documentation.

Freelance and creative-talent marketplaces describe themselves in a small set of words. DesignCrowd’s about page calls it an online creative marketplace that connects businesses with a global network of designers; English Wikipedia describes Crowdspring as a marketplace for crowdsourced creative services. Category names on these sites are practical rather than poetic: logo and identity, web, print, product and merchandise, art and illustration, with designer directories sorted by type, country and city.

The client’s first screen is usually a brief. When Slate tested Crowdspring in May 2011, posting a job meant filling in a “creative brief” form with set questions about what a logo should communicate. Contest sites then add their own rules on top of the brief. DesignCrowd’s how-it-works page lets a client choose a three-, five- or ten-day deadline, keeps designers from seeing one another’s entries and passes full copyright in the winning files to the client.

Showcase work is presented plainly, as entries and finished projects rather than as campaigns. Slate found that anyone could browse other people’s projects and, in many cases, their submissions, and that the site prompted clients to rate entries on a five-star scale and send feedback. Forbes reported in 2009 that Crowdspring offered larger buyers a Pro option that hid submissions from public view, and that its own logo came through its marketplace.

Corporate pages fill in the rest. DesignCrowd’s about section names its founder and chief executive and has a separate board and investors page listing its venture backers, while dated press releases record new country sites and new brands. This guide sets out what can be checked about each marketplace — who founded it, who owns it and how its interface works — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Great talent is everywhere.

Arc’s voice is built on one belief, stated at the top of its about page: “You don’t have to live in a tech hub to do great work.” A note signed by Liu follows, saying that moving to Silicon Valley years ago opened opportunities for him, and that in a world connected by the internet those opportunities need no longer depend on where someone lives.

The company lists three values — “Teamwork FTW,” “Go the extra mile” and “Relationships, not resources” — and says its staff have even taken flights to meet team members and users in person. The tone is informal and direct, aimed at developers as much as at the companies that hire them.

The name needs care. Arc trades at arc.dev, and is unrelated to the Arc web browser or to other businesses that share the short name; within its own site it signs itself simply “Arc,” with Codementor as its sister brand.

For a design guide, Arc shows how a short, plain name and a single idea — talent is everywhere — can hold together a platform that has grown from one audience to many. Compare Codeable, another vetted network for developers, and Toptal. For this guide we use midnight indigo, mist and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Arc’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.