What are the responsibilities and job description for the Operations Analyst position at Smith & Wilkinson?
About Smith & Wilkinson
Smith & Wilkinson is a South Portland-based talent advisory specializing in retained executive search and leadership consulting. We serve a growing variety of clients across Financial Services, Insurance, Specialized Lending, and Distribution & Manufacturing. Our clients hire us for the searches that matter most: CEOs, executive teams, and hard-to-fill leadership roles. We win on rigor, relationships, and results.
About the Role
The Operations Analyst is an early-career analytical role reporting to the COO. The job exists to create leverage across search delivery and internal operations: faster searches, cleaner and more trusted data, sharper reporting, and less manual work. This is not a recruiter-in-training seat. We are hiring for someone who already has a real analytical toolkit and wants to deepen it by working close to the operating core of a growing professional services firm.
Because we are a small company, the work is broad. You will support active searches, maintain and improve core datasets and reporting, and help design and build practical automations. The common thread is systems thinking: understanding how information is created, how it moves through a process, where it can break, and how to make the workflow more reliable. The role will grow primarily through increasing autonomy, scope, and ownership rather than a predetermined promotion ladder.
What You'll Do
Fulfillment Operations Support (approx. 30%)
Support active searches from launch through completion. You will join client intake and project launch calls, own market mapping and candidate-list buildout in our CRM, track project-level KPIs, and draft the first cut of placement success stories. The job is to turn an intake into a complete, accurate operating picture our consultants can act on quickly, while noticing gaps, inconsistencies, or process issues before they become downstream problems.
Data Support and Enrichment (approx. 30%)
Maintain daily KPI tracking and help steward the datasets that underpin our operating decisions. Audit and improve CRM records, reconcile inconsistencies, support Power BI reporting, and help document definitions and data flows. We care about more than clean rows: you should want to understand data provenance - where a field came from, when it is entered, how it changes, what transformations occur, and when a metric may be an artifact of the underlying data structure rather than a meaningful business signal.
Automation and Systems Improvement (approx. 20%)
Co-design and build lightweight automations that eliminate repetitive work and make our processes more reliable. You will help translate workflows into clear triggers, rules, conditions, exceptions, and outputs; then implement them using tools such as Microsoft Power Automate, Excel/Power Query/Office Scripts, CRM workflows, or simple scripts where appropriate. We prefer the simplest secure solution that works; AI will play a role, but it is not the default answer.
Research (approx. 15%)
Execute structured research projects using proprietary and open-source data sources in support of business development, marketing, market mapping, and internal decision-making. Turn an open-ended question into a clear research approach, defensible data, and a useful output.
Marketing Support (approx. 5%)
Support the marketing function with data pulls, list preparation, performance tracking, quality control, and other analytical support.
What Success Looks Like
Within your first year, our core operating data is cleaner, more consistent, and easier to trust. You can explain where key metrics come from and recognize when a surprising result is likely a real operating signal versus a data or architecture artifact. Searches move faster because the recruiting team has better market maps, cleaner project data, and reliable KPI support. Several repetitive workflows have been automated or materially simplified. Most importantly, colleagues can hand you a question or a process problem and trust you to structure it, surface the assumptions and edge cases, and move it toward a solution with progressively less direction.
What You Bring
• 0-3 years of relevant professional experience. A bachelor's degree or equivalent experience; field of study matters less than evidence that you can do the work.
• Initiative, curiosity, and follow-through. You like figuring things out and take pride in accurate work that makes the people and systems around you more effective.
• Strong Excel skills. You are comfortable with structured tables, lookups, COUNTIFS / SUMIFS, pivots, data cleaning, and validation.
• Competence in at least one analytical tool beyond Excel, such as Power BI/Power Query, SQL, Python, or a comparable platform. You understand basic concepts like tables, relationships or joins, data types, filters, and transformations. You do not need to be a software engineer; we care more about how you structure a problem and learn the right tool than about mastery of a particular programming language.
• A developing ability to think algorithmically. You can take a messy recurring process and break it into steps, rules, decision points, exceptions, and checks. Experience building workflows, automations, macros, or scripts is strongly preferred.
• Good data judgment. When a number looks wrong, your first questions are about definition, source, timing, completeness, and transformation - not just the number itself.
• Clear communication and documentation. You can explain an analytical issue to a nontechnical teammate and leave behind work that someone else can understand.
• You are based within commuting distance of South Portland, ME and comfortable working on-site. You are authorized to work in the U.S. without employer sponsorship now or in the future.
What We Offer
We're a growing firm with a team-oriented culture, and this role sits close to the operating core of the business. You will work directly with the COO and alongside our recruiting, finance, and marketing teams, gaining broad exposure to how a professional services company runs. For someone who becomes a trusted owner of data, systems, and processes, there is meaningful room to expand the role over time - taking on more complex work, broader ownership, and potentially leadership responsibility when the team grows.