Bethesda,

when you have the quest 'Hired Muscle' and the person you need to intimidate
is already killed you can't complete the quest anymore and can't go further into
the questline of the companions. Sometimes this is fixed by killing 'Amren' but
unfortunately this doesn't work for me. Please fix this as it bugs an entire questline..

Greetz,

a skyrim-fan

I regret to inform you that this is one of the bugs that is known to be recorded into the save file once it hits and therefore cannot be fixed after it has happened.

Do you have a saved game from before you took the Hired Muscle quest? If so then load that save and take another quest, if you don't have a previous save then you cannot continue with the Companions in this save.

Sorry dude.

I fell victim to this as well. Which effectively locked me out of any more quests for the Companions. Apparently I need to intimidate a dead Legion officer in Solitude. It's irritating, but at least I've got plenty of other things to keep me busy. I just wish there was some kind of workaround for it.

Maybe bethesda can make a fix that the game knows you're target is already dead and
closes the quest by talking to fargas or whoever gave you the quest..

The problem with the radiant quests will never be fixed. While I was watching Dawnguard on youtube I saw that a lot of the side quests send you to a lot of the same places you get sent to in the companions guild quests. They didn't even think to remove the silver hand bandits.

So, always, always save the game before getting any of these quests. I recently got a Skald bounty stuck in my journal and I had to go to a save 1 hour before because I didn't save