I work at a cannabis processing company. Part of our candidate selection process is a compensated Realistic Job Preview after passing a phone screening. Yesterday, we had a candidate come in, and it was clear pretty early in the day that it wasn’t a good fit, so we sent him home under the guise of having too many RJP’s in at one time. I paid him for his time and apologized for making him block off his day

Since the cannabis industry seems to attract a higher volume of people from rougher walks of life, we handle rejections remotely just to make extra sure that our employees are safe from any explosive and/or dangerous behavior. This doesn’t happen often, but it has happened, so we told this guy that we would be reaching out to him that evening or the next day on whether we would ask him to come back or not.

So today, I am going about my business and this guy messages me “Would you like to at least pretend to remain professional about this and let me know what exactly is going on”

I was taken aback by this as I told him I would be responding to him, but I let him know we were removing him from consideration. This clearly upset him and he began to send me more unstable messages, so I chose not to engage.

Well it turns out that a former co-worker of his works here, and now he is blaming him. He is sending him life threatening and slur filled messages on instagram.

I told the employee to take screen captures of everything, and I messaged the disgruntled candidate to please stop threatening my employees, to which he responded “what threats?” With some laugh emojis, and went on to claim I was the one harassing him.

I am scared for my employee, and I feel terrible. What should I do? Is there any recourse? According to the employee, this guy has a history of unstable behavior.