Couple of things here:
1) Enable the chat even when they aren't in lobby. It's next to impossible to catch someone in chat when they blast past the lobby portion. 99% of the time my "recruits" show Offline with no way to communicate with them. Currently staring at 4 recruit applications that I cant reply to because they are all showing offline.
2) Enable recruitment even when Kingdom is full. That way we could pre-load and vet a recruit prior to a kingdom mate leaving the game and abandoning his province.