Recruitment and retention challenges are once again leading to teacher shortages across the nation. Especially in urban and rural school districts, low salaries and poor working conditions often contribute to the difficulties of recruiting and keeping teachers, as can the challenges of the work itself. As a consequence, in many schools--especially those serving the most vulnerable populations--students often face a revolving door of teachers over the course of their school careers. Newly emerging teacher residency programs seek to address these problems by offering an innovative approach to recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers. Residencies have typically been focused in hard-to-staff geographic areas (urban and rural) and subject areas (e.g., mathematics, science, special education, and bilingual/English as a second language teaching). They recruit the teachers that local districts know they will need early, before they are prepared, so that they can then prepare them to excel and remain in these schools. When used in this deliberative manner, teacher residencies can address a crucial recruitment need while also building the capacity of districts to provide high-quality instruction to the students they serve. The design of teacher residency programs, their key characteristics, and their impact are discussed.