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50 free HR trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
40 free HR trivia questions with answers. Most HR trivia questions found online are either about your own company or about nothing at all. These forty are about the working world itself, which makes them usable in any office. There is an employment law round - the 1938 act that created the minimum wage, the leave law vetoed twice before it passed, the 1970 statute that finally made safety cheaper than replacement - and a workplace history round covering the man who designed the cubicle, the lighting experiment that produced the Hawthorne effect, the letter Leonardo da Vinci sent to a prospective employer, and the naturalist who first put wheels on a chair. Every answer is written against a sourced account with the sentence that establishes it attached, so nobody has to argue with the quizmaster. Print it for a team meeting, an onboarding session, or the last twenty minutes of an away day.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1938 law created the American right to a minimum wage?
The Fair Labor Standards Act
The Fair Labor Standards Act set a 25-cent hourly floor in 1938 and also introduced time-and-a-half overtime and banned oppressive child labour.
Q 02After how many hours a week does that law require overtime pay?
Forty
Forty: hours beyond that in a work week earn time-and-a-half; the 1938 act started the threshold at 44 hours and stepped it down to 40 by 1940.
Q 03What federal minimum wage took effect in the US in July 2009?
$7.25 an hour
$7.25 an hour, the last of three steps set by the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007; states may set a higher rate, and many have, so the federal floor rarely bites.
Q 04On which day is American Labor Day held?
The first Monday of September
The first Monday of September: Canada marks its Labour Day on the same day, and the long weekend has come to mark the unofficial end of American summer.
Q 05In which year did Labor Day become a federal holiday?
1894
By then thirty states were already marking it officially.
Q 06Which two groups promoted the original American holiday for workers?
The Central Labor Union and Knights of Labor
The Central Labor Union and Knights of Labor organised the first parade, which went through New York City on 5 September 1882.
Q 07Which federal agency, created in 1935, runs US union representation elections?
The National Labor Relations Board
The National Labor Relations Board was created by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, the Wagner Act, to run representation elections and police unfair labour practices.
Q 08Which Chicago event does May Day commemorate?
The Haymarket affair
The Haymarket affair: the Second International chose 1 May in 1889 to mark the 1886 general strike for the eight-hour day that ended in the Haymarket Square bombing.
Q 09How much leave does the Family and Medical Leave Act guarantee?
12 unpaid work weeks
12 unpaid work weeks in any 12-month period, for a new child, a seriously ill family member, or the employee's own serious illness, with the job protected on return.
Q 10Which president signed that leave law in February 1993?
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton signed it on 5 February 1993, the first major bill he signed as president, barely a fortnight after taking office.
Q 11What happened to earlier versions of that leave bill?
They were vetoed twice
They were vetoed twice: Congress passed versions in 1990 and 1992, and the president of the day struck down both before losing the 1992 election.
Q 12Which arm of the Labor Department administers that leave law?
The Wage and Hour Division
The Wage and Hour Division, which also enforces the minimum wage and overtime rules, handles FMLA complaints; highly compensated 'key employees' face limits on reinstatement under it.
Q 13Which 2019 amendment gave government workers twelve weeks off on full pay for a new child?
Q 21Which Harvard professor took over the Hawthorne studies in 1928?
Elton Mayo
Elton Mayo, an Australian-born Harvard Business School professor, led the Hawthorne interviewing and bank-wiring studies from 1928 and wrote The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization in 1933.
Q 22Who is sometimes credited with writing the first résumé?
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci wrote a letter of about 1482 to Milan's ruler Ludovico Sforza listing his engineering and weapon designs, mentioning his painting only at the end.
Q 23From which language does the word 'résumé' come?
French
French: résumé is the past participle of résumer, 'to summarise', so the word literally means 'summed up'.
The Federal Employee Paid Leave Act
The Federal Employee Paid Leave Act rode on the 2020 defence authorisation bill signed in December 2019, and applied to births and placements from October 2020.
Q 14Who designed the office cubicle?
Robert Propst
Robert Propst, who ran Herman Miller's research arm, devised the system in the 1960s, and later deplored the cramped cubicle farms it spawned.
Q 15What name did that design carry when Herman Miller released it in the late 1960s?
Action Office II
Action Office II: the first version, Action Office I of 1964, sold poorly, so the redesign added the movable, fabric-covered panels that became the cubicle.
Q 16Why was that design originally seen as an improvement?
It gave more privacy than open desk rows
It gave more privacy than open desk rows: before it, most offices were bullpens of desks in one open room, and the designer's panels promised workers a space of their own.
Q 17Who won an award for the failed first version of that design, without crediting his colleague?
George Nelson
George Nelson, whose studio styled the failed 1964 original, accepted the design award for it; his colleague went back and designed the version that actually sold.
Q 18What does the Hawthorne effect describe?
People changing behaviour when observed
People changing behaviour when observed: the effect took its name from 1920s productivity experiments at a Western Electric plant, where output rose whatever the researchers changed.
Q 19What were the original Hawthorne studies actually testing?
Lighting levels
Lighting levels: the 1924–27 illumination studies found output rose whether the light was turned up or down, so brightness itself could not explain the gains.
Q 20Where was the factory that gave the effect its name?
Cicero, Illinois
Cicero, Illinois: Western Electric's Hawthorne Works sat just west of Chicago's city line, and the best-known experiments followed women assembling telephone relays.
Q 24What is the standard document called in Europe and Asia?
A curriculum vitae
A curriculum vitae, Latin for 'course of life': outside North America the term covers the short document Americans call a résumé, not just the long academic CV.
Q 25What does a reverse chronological résumé put first?
The most recent job
The most recent job goes first, working backwards; it is the default format because recruiters skim the top third of the page before deciding.
Q 26What distinguishes a structured job interview?
Every applicant gets the same questions
Every applicant gets the same questions, asked in the same order and scored against set criteria; unstructured interviews predict job performance far less reliably.
Q 27Who first coined the term 'human resource'?
John R. Commons
John R. Commons, the labour economist, used 'human resource' in his 1893 book The Distribution of Wealth, decades before HR became a distinct profession.
Q 28Which two industrial-era thinkers laid the groundwork for the HR field?
Robert Owen and Charles Babbage
Robert Owen and Charles Babbage both argued during the industrial revolution that a business could not survive without healthy, well-treated workers; Owen cut hours at his New Lanark mills.
Q 29What did Frederick Winslow Taylor call his approach to work efficiency?
Scientific management
Scientific management, often called Taylorism, broke jobs into timed tasks; Taylor's 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management shaped early twentieth-century personnel practice.
Q 30What was published for the first time in 1922?
The Journal of Personnel Research
The Journal of Personnel Research began in 1922 as a joint effort by the National Research Council and the Engineering Foundation, an early sign of personnel work becoming a field of study.