How safe are you from a zombie attack?
Would you be able to answer this question if a candidate were to ask? Our guess is no. Yet, raised as they were on a steady diet of zombie movies and supernatural themed TV, millennials are particularly tuned in to the potential for a zombie apocalypse.
And just because no one has asked doesn’t mean someone won’t, especially at this time of the year when we’re all acutely aware of ghosts, goblins, and headless horsemen.
Acutely aware of the shortage of objective data on zombie attack survivability, CareerBuilder has become the first leading company — outside of Hollywood — to offer some hard and fast numbers.
After calculating the skills, industries, military presence, medical research facilities, and food supplies, CareerBuilder and its data research arm, EMSI, declared Boston to be the safest place to survive a zombie attack.
Talk about a selling point for tech recruiters! Always struggling to compete with California’s sunny (when it’s not foggy) Silicon Valley, the center of the tech universe, Boston companies can now boast of the city’s first-place ranking. Extra props if the company hosts a bootleg Dead Island 2 on its network server.
The San Jose-Santa Clara Silicon Valley technopolis didn’t do too badly. Of the 53 metro areas with a population of at least a million, the Valley ranked 19th. The San Francisco metro area, immediately to the north, ranked 22nd. That assumes the food supply there will hold out long enough to contain the attack and find a cure, not at all a sure thing given the Valley ranks 50th for access to food.
Seattle, the other tech center in perpetual battle over talent, ranked 6th.
There’s an interactive map of all 53 major metros, showing how each scored in the various categories and providing an overall rank.
Alas, EMSI and CareerBuilder see little hope for the nation’s three largest metro areas. New York City was dead last. Containment of the zombie threat is not even possible in that dense metropolis, where the populace will become undead long before a cure is found — assuming they don’t first succumb to starvation.
Chicago, at 49th, and Los Angeles, at 51st, face a fate as gruesome as New York’s, says CareerBuilder. Coincidentally, Chicago is CareerBuilder’s home.
Much as we respect the immense research that went into this project, some of its findings directly contradict those coming out of Hollywood. In the zombie war documentary, Zombieland, Los Angeles is a safe haven, and Columbus, Ohio, which CareerBuilder ranked 3rd for survivability, was destroyed by the undead.
We emailed a CareerBuilder spokesperson for an explanation, but have so far not gotten one.