Noticed your question kinda got skipped over a little.
To help you and anyone else looking at this, the biggest thing I can tell you is, yes. NPCs will already be living in your hamlet and doing the professions listed.
What you claimed is an active, populated, settlement, and this means that all the jobs it says it will have will already exist by people that will have homes, desires, and needs. Exposition is more about expansion, or adding things to make your town unique, or specific to your desires, and is meant to be building upon the framework that already exists.
As far as your recruitment question goes, well I have no idea. People have different luck with different methods of recruitment. Some post recruitment posts and get lucky when someone stumbles upon them, others join larger communities and fill a niche that helps people that want to be a part of that niche find somewhere to belong, and others still actively recruit outside of the CoE community by playing other games and meeting people and inviting them to check out CoE.
Personally, when I was fulfilling a recruiter role in a duchy I was in previously, I simply remained active around the forums and the CoE discord server. People notice you when you are active and if you get along with said people they are organically drawn to you. Didn't exactly keep count, but everyone I can say I recruited to that duchy was simply by being myself and being active :shrug:
in short you have a settlement that will already be populated with npcs fulfilling their roles and living their lives, you can bring new people in, you can wait it out and let your settlement fill slowly over time, or you can simply hang around the community and naturally draw in like minded individuals. There is no one answer to this :D
