Use of power to punish, especially those considering joining your tribe, are empirically shown to be disliked and generate a reduction in available power over and alignment with those outside the tribe. This will hurt Zenefits, despite the CEO's intention to strengthen it. This was an amazing opportunity for the Zenefits CEO to publicly and prominently compete and make the case for working at Zenefit's (in a general sense, not for this candidate specifically). Instead, he ran away and threw the candidate under the bus. Shameful.