General Manager Mark Heilman counsels an employee.

“Some things we can’t change. We are 24-hour restaurants, and we have to staff them somehow,” acknowledges Karen Bolden, chief people officer for Eat’n Park, a 79-unit family-dining chain.

Eat’n Park has developed several programs to find and keep the unit managers it needs. The company re-dubbed a 10-week management internship “the management residency program,” began focus groups to evaluate training programs, mapped out career paths and created a new-manager monitoring program to keep responsibilities from overwhelming neophytes. There’s also a nascent effort to extend the Eat’n Park brand message to cover recruiting.

This year, the Homestead, Pa.-based company needs to fill 108 assistant manager and manager slots, about the same number hired in 2007 and 2006. Those figures do not include general managers, to whom the assistant managers and managers report. To put that figure in perspective, the company currently employs 233 such managers. Turnover, including general managers, is running about 30 percent, according to the company.

After roughly six months of running shifts, regional managers, responsible for multiple units, meet with assistant managers to discuss career-path goals and procedures.

The neophytes also griped about the length of time spent at work, which some said also included the hours they spent driving to the job. Bolden, who joined Eat’n Park in 1991, and Sharlow, who has been with the company full or part time since 1980, knew times had changed. Only a decade ago, assistant managers used to suck up stuff like that. “We never thought driving to work was part of the job,” Bolden chuckles.

The duo introduced aforementioned recruiting and retention measures to make the assistant manager’s job less frustrating in the hope they last. If they do, they will probably stick around for a long time. “Every one of our regional directors started as an assistant manager,” Bolden says proudly. “And all but one general manager was first hired as assistant managers.”

To find assistant managers and instill loyalty, Sharlow visits nearby universities offering restaurant-management curriculums. At Pennsylvania State University, her alma mater, she meets with sophomores and juniors in the hopes they’ll become managers in residence—the new name for interns.

“It’s more like you are a doctor-in-training, a resident,” says Sharlow. Students manage shifts and are accountable for sales-building programs. “It might be figuring out how to sell more beverages,” she adds.

The residency ends with a presentation of their efforts to increase business, student to top management, including CEO James Broadhurst or his son, Jeff, the company president. “We work very hard on accessibility to senior management. It’s always been there, but it hasn’t been as important as it is today,” Sharlow says.

Eat’n Park’s “critical touch points” program is used to celebrate significant events in a young manager’s career as well as to coach them when serious problems arise.

It’s not just college kids who get to hang with muckety-mucks. New managers recruited from within or on job Web sites also meet with regional vice presidents shortly after joining. The effort is part of the company’s “critical touch points,” a program Sharlow launched this year to provide assistant GMs with a sense of inclusiveness while making sure they’re developing skills to become general managers. She keeps a log of who “touches” whom and when.

“Even before the manager starts working, they get a call from their regional vice president, saying, 'So glad to hear you’re on board.’ The [VPs] take notes during the conversation and use them at the next critical touch point,” Sharlow explains, adding the new manager shortly thereafter receives a book on leadership skills from the vice president. “You feel like you belong. You’re family. You can ask for help,” she stresses.

Although there are no proscribed number of “touches” or schedules for making contact with new managers, Sharlow adds, higher-ups have more contact with them in the first year than in the following three years—and they are as likely to celebrate a promotion as to coach the novices on a problem.

One question that new hires have been asking in the focus groups Sharlow and Bolden have been holding six times a year for the past three years concerns career paths, i.e., how do I get to be general manager? Bolden is old enough to recall that in an earlier era one simply worked hard to earn one’s stripes. “In ’91, no one asked what they had to do to get promoted,” she remembers.

Today, however, given many other restaurants ambitious young managers can work for, Bolden believes it is imperative to communicate this information regularly. So far she and Sharlow have outlined steps from assistant manager to GM. “After about six months, the regional manager who hired them gives the assistant the map, saying they’re ready to take the next step and to begin more training,” explains Sharlow, who’s currently mapping the steps to get from GM to regional director, a path Sharlow herself took before landing in her current post.

“The more we bear witness to the loyalty in our company, the faster [assistant GMs] will fall in love with our company,” says GM Jeff Dengler, who has worked for Eat’n Park for 31 years. But the question is, he adds, “How do we get them to feel that way as soon as possible?”

Bolden and Sharlow’s efforts appear to be paying off. In recent years the 49-year-old chain has collected numerous accolades, including James Broadhurst’s Workplace Legacy Award from People Report, a Dallas-based human-resources benchmarking organization. People Report founder and CEO Joni Doolin praised Broadhurst for an ability to “keep a family feeling embedded deep in the roots of [Eat’n Park’s] culture.”

It’s not the first time the company has been singled out by People Report. Bolden’s department received the Heart of the Workplace Award in 2005 for efforts on behalf of employees and managers. The same year Chain Leader featured Eat’n Park in its “Best Places to Work” issue for its community-relations efforts. Efforts have also been recognized by the National Restaurant Association, the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette and the Pittsburgh Human Resources Association.

The women have another scheme up their sleeves that could hasten even more love. Bolden and Sharlow say it’s in the planning stages and are therefore reluctant to discuss specifics. But they allow that a branding effort related to recruitment is in the works.

“This is something new this year, and we haven’t worked it out,” Bolden explains, adding that Marketing Vice President Kevin O’Connell and Creative Services Vice President Cliff Miller are helping.

“I want lots of soirees,” Sharlow exclaims. By that, she adds, she means she wants to hold informational open houses to attract potential manager candidates. “Once you see certain things, you think Eat’n Park and you have this feeling.”

It’s a feeling she hopes will cause people to apply for an entry-level manager’s job. Says Sharlow: “Everyone is talking about recruitment and retention, because operations cannot achieve their goals without people to do it.”