Human Resources Trivia
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98 free Human Resources trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Human resources touches every job in the country, but few people outside the department know where its rules and rituals came from. This human resources trivia quiz covers the landmark US employment laws HR teams live by: the Fair Labor Standards Act and the first minimum wage, Title VII and the EEOC, the ADEA, the ADA, FMLA, OSHA, ERISA, COBRA, the WARN Act, USERRA, GINA, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, Form I-9 and the at-will doctrine. It also covers the people and ideas behind modern people management: Robert Owen and the eight-hour day, Frederick Taylor and scientific management, Elton Mayo and the Hawthorne studies, Maslow's hierarchy, Herzberg's two factors, McGregor's Theory X and Y, Peter Drucker, Dave Ulrich's business partner model and the Peter principle, plus SHRM, the CIPD, the Myers-Briggs test, 360-degree feedback, applicant tracking systems, LinkedIn and Workday, and the origins of words like onboarding. The 98 questions run from easy to genuinely hard, and every answer was checked against the statute or the documented history, so it works for an HR team meeting icebreaker, an SHRM chapter night or a study session for a certification exam.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1938 US law created the federal minimum wage and time-and-a-half overtime pay?
Fair Labor Standards Act
Fair Labor Standards Act: its first workweek cap was 44 hours, not 40, stepping down to 40 by 1940; it also banned 'oppressive child labor'.
Q 02What was the first federal minimum wage set in 1938?
25 cents an hour
25 cents an hour came to about $11 a week, and Franklin Roosevelt mocked any 'calamity-howling executive' on $1,000 a day who claimed such pay would wreck American industry.
Q 03What hourly federal minimum wage took effect in July 2009?
$7.25
$7.25 was the last of three yearly steps set by a 2007 law, which ended a freeze at $5.15 that had lasted almost ten years.
Q 04How many weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave does the FMLA guarantee eligible employees?
12
12 weeks was hard won: a family-leave bill was first drafted in 1984 and brought to Congress every year after, surviving two presidential vetoes before it became law.
Q 05Which president signed the Family and Medical Leave Act into law?
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton signed it in his third week as president; his predecessor had twice vetoed similar bills passed by Congress.
Q 06Which president signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, creating OSHA?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon signed it when about 14,000 American workers were dying on the job each year; the act created OSHA to enforce safety rules and NIOSH to research them.
Q 07Which section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans employment discrimination?
Title VII
Title VII gained the word 'sex' through a one-word floor amendment from Howard Smith, a Virginia segregationist who opposed the whole bill; the House adopted his amendment 168 to 133.
Q 08Which federal agency, established in July 1965, enforces workplace anti-discrimination laws?
EEOC
EEOC opened in 1965 with no power to sue: it could only investigate and seek voluntary settlements until Congress let it take employers to court in 1972.
Q 09Which practice did the Age Discrimination in Employment Act outlaw in 1986?
Mandatory retirement
Mandatory retirement had stayed legal at 65 under the 1967 act, which protected only workers aged 40 to 65; the cap rose to 70 before Congress scrapped it for most jobs.
Q 10Which president signed the Equal Pay Act of 1963?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy signed it while noting that the average woman earned only 60 percent of a man's wage, and called the law 'a first step'.
Q 11Which president signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law?
George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush signed it months after activists left their wheelchairs and crutches at the foot of the Capitol and hauled themselves up its steps to demand the stalled bill.
Q 12The ADA excuses an employer from an accommodation that would cause what?
Undue hardship
Undue hardship means significant difficulty or expense measured against the employer's own size and budget, so a large firm must do more than a small one; those with under 15 staff are exempt.
Q 13The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 is better known by what name?
The Wagner Act
Q 21Which document must every US employer complete to verify a new hire's identity and work authorization?
Form I-9
Form I-9 dates from a 1986 immigration law that made it illegal to knowingly hire unauthorized workers, so every new hire, citizens included, must show documents proving the right to work.
Q 22Which is the only US state where firing a worker past probation generally requires good cause?
Montana
Montana's 1987 Wrongful Discharge from Employment Act makes it the lone state to replace at-will firing by statute; a worker dismissed without good cause can recover up to four years of lost wages.
Q 23Which workplace term did Marilyn Loden coin at a 1978 panel on women's careers?
Glass ceiling
The Wagner Act, named for its Senate sponsor, met open defiance: opponents advised employers to disregard it as unconstitutional, and injunctions paralyzed its board until the Supreme Court upheld it by one vote in 1937.
Q 14The Taft-Hartley Act, which curbed union power after World War II, became law over which president's veto?
Harry Truman
Harry Truman vetoed it in June 1947 as 'unworkable', but Congress overrode him within days by a wide margin, with many of his fellow Democrats voting against him.
Q 15Which automaker's 1963 South Bend plant closure gave momentum to the 1974 pension law ERISA?
Studebaker
Studebaker's pension plan was so underfunded that when the South Bend plant shut, thousands of workers lost most or all of what they had been promised; the scandal drove the 1974 ERISA reforms.
Q 16Which US law lets workers who leave a job keep their employer's group health coverage at their own expense?
COBRA
COBRA stands for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act: the health-coverage rule was one part of a sprawling 1985 budget bill, which is why its name says nothing about insurance.
Q 17How much notice of a mass layoff does the WARN Act require from employers with 100+ workers?
60 days
60 days is also the size of the penalty: an employer who skips the notice owes each worker back pay and benefits for every day it fell short, up to 60.
Q 18USERRA, a 1994 law, guarantees which group their jobs back after time away?
Military service members
Military service members return on an 'escalator': the law puts them in the job, seniority and pay they would have reached had they never left, not merely the post they held.
Q 19GINA, enacted in 2008, prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of what?
Genetic information
Genetic information is off limits even for catching a culprit: in 2015 a jury awarded $2.2 million to two workers whose employer swabbed their DNA to find who was fouling its warehouse.
Q 20The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was the first bill signed by which president?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama signed it on January 29, 2009; it resets the 180-day clock for equal-pay claims with every discriminatory paycheck, reversing the 2007 Ledbetter v. Goodyear ruling.
Glass ceiling was Loden's reply, by her own account, to fellow panellists who blamed women's poor self-image for their stalled careers; she was working in HR in the telecoms industry at the time.
Q 24In April 2024, which US agency issued a rule banning non-compete agreements nationwide?
Federal Trade Commission
Federal Trade Commission members voted 3-2 for the ban, but it never took effect: a federal judge in Texas set it aside nationwide in August 2024, two weeks before its start date.
Q 25Who wrote the 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management?
Frederick W. Taylor
Frederick W. Taylor claimed his methods let a Bethlehem Steel laborer he called Schmidt load 47 tons of pig iron a day instead of 12.5, for a 60 percent raise.
Q 26The Hawthorne studies of the 1920s were conducted at a plant belonging to which company?
Western Electric
Western Electric's Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois, made telephone equipment; its lighting tests found no clear link between light levels and output, which pushed the researchers to look for other causes.
Q 27Which Harvard professor's work on the Hawthorne studies helped found the human relations movement?
Elton Mayo
Elton Mayo, an Australian called in to the plant in 1928, concluded the test-room women were producing more because they had become a team, not because of the rest breaks or pay being tested.
Q 28In what year did Abraham Maslow publish "A Theory of Human Motivation"?
1943
1943, in Psychological Review; Maslow never drew the famous pyramid himself, which appeared in later textbooks and consultants' diagrams.
Q 29In Herzberg's two-factor theory, what are the conditions that merely prevent dissatisfaction called?
Hygiene factors
Salary and safe conditions are hygiene factors: their absence upsets people, but their presence does not motivate.
Q 30Who developed Theory X and Theory Y, the contrasting models of how managers view workers?
Douglas McGregor
Douglas McGregor is often seen as Theory Y's advocate, yet his MIT colleague Edgar Schein found him discouraged that Theory Y had hardened into a creed as rigid as Theory X; he wanted managers to question their own assumptions.