New graduate nurses are traditionally not recruited for home health care (HHC). Due to staffing shortages, a HHC agency was interested in hiring graduate nurses, but there was concern about associated risks. The purpose of this quality improvement project was to develop a nurse residency program to safely transition graduate nurses to the HHC setting. After initial program design, analysis using a failure mode effects analysis (FMEA) was conducted, and risk mitigation strategies were applied. The overall risk of onboarding graduate nurses in HHC was reduced by 42% after applying harm reduction tactics identified from the FMEA. The FMEA was found to be a useful tool to prospectively identify areas of concern and apply harm reduction tactics prior to nurse residency implementation.