Traits should have a minimum stat value before they appear on a hearthling. A hearthling with 1 Body and 1 Spirit should not want to be a Knight, and a hearthling with 1 Mind should not want to be a crafter.
Alternatively, we should be able to reroll (or reject) a new hearthling who wants to join after seeing his/her stats.
Telling the hearthling: You can be anything you dream of! 
Well i have had the exact same thought as you @JayDub404… kind of strange how we have so much control over our first seven heartlings and then afterwards they tend to work against us when arriving and we have to agree that they can join before we know anything about them. Hopefully the developers are aware of this unlogical approach and have a plan to change it soon? 
… unless we can train them (IMHO). Which we currently can’t.
I agree with this. It is strange, and I do feel like, as a player, I should have some power over who I accept and who I don’t. I’ve been playing Oxygen Not Included a bit lately, and when the Replicant spawner offers me a new person, I get to pick from three choices. And I have the option of declining all three. The downside is the spawner has to recharge, so you have to go for a while more before you’re given the option again.
I don’t think that approach fits for Stonehearth because it feels a bit too cold “Sorry, no, you suck, so you can’t come live with us.” … so I think that’s probably why I vote for training capabilities. Because then you can preserve that “come as you are” approach, knowing that you can make someone with deficiencies better over time.
Why not. (honest feedback ) Sure, it is inconvienient for the player, but why should that stop hearthlings from wishing what they do?
Humans can have hopeless dreams, why wouldn’t hearthlings be able to (for now without the possibility of training). There’s another approach to it.
Instead of being able it improve the mind, body, and spirit stats(MBS), I think there should be an improvement into how the game calculates the 9 derived stats for each hearthling. Currently the game calculates these by taking a hearthlings MBS stats timesing by 10 and adding a random number between 1 and 10 (could be slightly higher). This is a very simple way to calculate the stats that effect all the other things a hearthling does.
What I suggest is that the traits that a hearthling has now effect these stats directly, someone who wants to be a craftsman gets an extra 20-30 of each of the mind stats, someone who wants to be a combatant gets increases to the body ones like +10 to the movement stat and +20 to the health and damage stats.
On top of this if a system that recalculates these stats every 12 or 24 hours based on how happy a hearthling is was implemented, hearthlings would physically get better at there jobs the happier they were and a 1,1,1 MBS hearthling would preform like a 3,4,3 when they were super happy.
To do this you would add a multiplier to the random number that gets added to the stat. This multiplier would be calculated using the hearthlings current happiness, with 0 being near the middle of the happiness bar, so negatives can happen if a hearthling is really sad.
The multiplier could follow some quadratic relation so when a hearthling is near the middle there is little to no effect but once the hearthling is really happy or really unhappy the effect would quickly become noticeable.
I like the idea of happyness improves performance.
“This multiplier would be calculated using the hearthlings current happiness, with 0 being near the middle of the happiness bar, so negatives can happen if a hearthling is really sad.”
ehm, don’t you mean a bonus, not a multiplyer. Having a 0 multiplyer in neutral circumstances is not really ideal.
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Yeah, if your nit picking
I was thinking the way I would code it would be to have a quadratic that calculated a multiplier based on the happinesses bars position and then an if statement to calculate the multipliers sign. You could then make the quadratic so that it’s minima was at 1.
Perhaps these traits could actually affect the hearthling’s stats over time. A hearthling with just 1 in body but dreams to be a knight will perhaps have it’s body stat slowly increase if it actually levels up as a knight. A hearthling that already has that high stat would be preferred still but the hearthling with the desire could work hard to achieve what they want and become useful in that job over time.
The level system already caps out at 6 so if a knight with 1 body gets +1 per level it could have that high stat eventually. If it has say a 3 in body it could have 6 at level 3 and be capped.
