Operations Analyst

About the Role

The Operations Analyst is an early-career analytical role reporting to the COO. The role's purpose is to create leverage across search delivery and internal operations by enabling faster searches, cleaner and more trusted data, sharper reporting, and reduced manual work. This is an opportunity to deepen an analytical toolkit by working close to the operating core of a growing professional services firm. The work is broad and includes supporting active searches, maintaining and improving core datasets and reporting, and helping to design and build practical automations. A core requirement 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 is expected to grow primarily through increasing autonomy, scope, and ownership.

Key Responsibilities

• Fulfillment Operations Support (approx. 30%)
• Support active searches from launch through completion.
• Participate in client intake and project launch calls.
• Own market mapping and candidate-list buildout in the CRM.
• Track project-level KPIs.
• Draft initial placement success stories.
• Turn intake into a complete, accurate operating picture for consultants, identifying gaps, inconsistencies, or process issues.
• Data Support and Enrichment (approx. 30%)
• Maintain daily KPI tracking and steward datasets that underpin operating decisions.
• Audit and improve CRM records.
• Reconcile inconsistencies.
• Support Power BI reporting.
• Document definitions and data flows.
• Understand data provenance: where a field came from, when it is entered, how it changes, transformations, and when a metric may be an artifact of underlying data structure.
• Automation and Systems Improvement (approx. 20%)
• Co-design and build lightweight automations to eliminate repetitive work and improve process reliability.
• Translate workflows into clear triggers, rules, conditions, exceptions, and outputs.
• Implement automations using tools such as Microsoft Power Automate, Excel/Power Query/Office Scripts, CRM workflows, or simple scripts.
• Research (approx. 15%)
• Execute structured research projects using proprietary and open-source data sources for business development, marketing, market mapping, and internal decision-making.
• Turn open-ended questions into clear research approaches, defensible data, and useful outputs.
• 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

• Core operating data becomes cleaner, more consistent, and easier to trust within the first year.
• Ability to explain the origin of key metrics and recognize when a surprising result is a real operating signal versus a data or architecture artifact.
• Searches move faster due to improved market maps, cleaner project data, and reliable KPI support.
• Several repetitive workflows are automated or materially simplified.
• Colleagues can confidently delegate questions or process problems, trusting the individual to structure them, surface assumptions and edge cases, and move towards a solution with progressively less direction.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Strong Excel skills: 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. Understanding of basic concepts like tables, relationships/joins, data types, filters, and transformations.
• Developing ability to think algorithmically: ability to break down messy recurring processes into steps, rules, decision points, exceptions, and checks.
• Experience building workflows, automations, macros, or scripts is strongly preferred.
• Good data judgment: ability to question data based on definition, source, timing, completeness, and transformation.
• Clear communication and documentation skills: ability to explain analytical issues to non-technical teammates and produce understandable work.
• Initiative, curiosity, and follow-through: desire to figure things out and pride in accurate work that enhances effectiveness of people and systems.
• Based within commuting distance of South Portland, ME and comfortable working on-site.
• Authorized to work in the U.S. without employer sponsorship.

Qualifications

• 0-3 years of relevant professional experience.
• A bachelor's degree or equivalent experience; field of study matters less than evidence of ability to do the work.