Operations Analyst

Operations Analyst

Smith & Wilkinson | South Portland, ME | Reports to the Chief Operating Officer

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 a re-established position reporting to the COO. The role exists to provide real leverage to our client-facing team today: faster searches, cleaner data, sharper reporting. But it's deliberately built as a training ground. Doing this job well means learning which candidates fit which searches and why, how our data and systems work, how we measure whether a search is on track, and how our consultants engage clients. Those are the exact foundations of the recruiter seat, and our intent is to hire someone capable of growing into that role when the business is ready for them.

What You'll Do

Fulfillment Operations Support (approx. 50%)

Support active searches from launch through completion. You'll join client intake and project launch calls, own the market mapping for each search, build candidate lists in our CRM for our recruiting team, track project-level KPIs, and draft the first cut of each placement success story. Early on, the job is speed and thoroughness: getting quickly to complete, accurate lists our consultants can run with. The judgment about who genuinely fits comes with time, and this seat is built to develop it.

Data Support and Enrichment (approx. 25%)

Maintain daily tracking of KPIs. Audit and improve records in our CRM. Provide light maintenance support on our Power BI reporting.

Research (approx. 15%)

Execute research projects using proprietary and open-source data sources in support of marketing and business development.

Marketing Support (approx. 10%)

Support the marketing function with data, performance tracking, & a second set of eyes.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first year, searches move measurably faster from launch to candidate presentation, our data is cleaner and more trusted than when you arrived. The consulting team is noticeably more productive because of the leverage you create. And you're building the market knowledge and judgment that make you a credible candidate for the recruiter seat when the business is ready to add one.

Who You Are

You are early in your career, you work hard, and you'd rather figure something out than wait to be shown. You get genuine satisfaction from doing great work for a team and making the people around you better. You're detail-oriented in the way that matters: your work is accurate, complete, and doesn't need to be checked twice. You pick up new tools quickly and like experimenting with technology, including AI, to work smarter. You don't need executive search experience. You need curiosity, drive, and follow-through, because those are the same things that will make you successful in the seat this one leads to.

What We Offer

We're a fast-growing firm with a team-oriented culture. This opportunity comes with a real education: you'll learn our industry, see how a professional services business runs from the inside, and build the foundations of client-facing work while doing work that matters today. For someone willing to put in the effort, the path is real, and so is the earning potential that comes with it.