HR Trivia
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95 free HR trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 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 95 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 after the Supreme Court had struck down the New Deal's earlier wage rules.
Q 02What overtime rate does US federal law require after 40 hours a week?
Time-and-a-half
Time-and-a-half kicks in after 40 hours a week, but the law's many exemptions leave some workers with no overtime right at all.
Q 03What federal minimum wage took effect in the US in July 2009?
$7.25 an hour
$7.25 an hour is still the federal floor as of 2026, and after inflation it buys far less than the minimum did at its 1968 peak.
Q 04On which day is American Labor Day held?
The first Monday of September
The first Monday of September caught on as a workers' holiday state by state before Congress made it a federal holiday in 1894.
Q 05Which president signed Labor Day into federal law in 1894?
Grover Cleveland
Grover Cleveland signed the Labor Day law on June 28, 1894, and his government then sent troops to Chicago to break the Pullman strike.
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 staged the first parade in 1882 as a show of organized labor's strength, followed by a picnic.
Q 07Which federal agency, created in 1935, runs US union representation elections?
The National Labor Relations Board
The National Labor Relations Board survived an early test when the Supreme Court upheld the 1935 Wagner Act that created it, in 1937.
Q 08Which Chicago event does May Day commemorate?
The Haymarket affair
The Haymarket affair grew out of a nationwide May 1, 1886 strike for an eight-hour day, and days later a bomb exploded at a Chicago rally.
Q 09What does the Family and Medical Leave Act guarantee eligible private-sector workers for up to 12 weeks?
Unpaid leave
Unpaid leave is all it guarantees, and an employer can even require workers to use up their accrued paid vacation during that time.
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 the Family and Medical Leave Act?
The Wage and Hour Division
The Wage and Hour Division handles complaints, and an employer that breaks the law can owe lost wages plus an equal sum in liquidated damages.
Q 13Which personality test, created by a mother and daughter, sorts people into 16 types?
Myers-Briggs
Q 21Who is sometimes credited with writing the first résumé?
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci's so-called résumé was really a letter, written around 1482 to win the patronage of Milan's ruler.
Q 22Which country gave workers a legal 'right to disconnect' from work email in January 2017?
France
France adopted the rule to protect workers' health, as answering work email out of hours risked stress and sleep problems.
Q 23What do most of Europe and Asia call the document Americans call a résumé?
A curriculum vitae
A curriculum vitae, Latin for course of one's life, does a résumé's job there, while in North America a CV usually means a much longer record.
Myers-Briggs results often fail to hold, as many people who retake the test just five weeks later get a different type.
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 16Which comic strip, launched in 1989, turned a put-upon engineer's cubicle life into office satire?
Dilbert
Dilbert was dropped by hundreds of newspapers in 2023 after creator Scott Adams called Black Americans a "hate group" in a video.
Q 17What does the Hawthorne effect describe?
People changing behaviour when observed
The effect describing people changing behaviour when observed is named after Western Electric's Hawthorne Works, yet critics say the original studies showed little of it.
Q 18What were the original Hawthorne studies actually testing?
Lighting levels
Lighting levels were tested from 1924 to 1927, and accounts found output did not track how bright or dim the room was.
Q 19Where 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 20Which Harvard Business School professor led the Hawthorne studies at Western Electric?
Elton Mayo
Elton Mayo concluded that people's work performance depends on their social relationships as well as the job itself.
Q 24What distinguishes a structured job interview?
Every applicant gets the same questions
Every applicant gets the same questions, and research finds more structured interviews give more valid, consistent ratings.
Q 25Which women's group launched Take Our Daughters to Work Day, first held in 1993?
Ms. Foundation for Women
The Ms. Foundation for Women created the day to help convince girls they could earn their own paychecks, and boys were later invited too.
Q 26Which tech company popularized letting employees spend 20% of their work time on side projects?
Google's 20% time let employees prototype their own ideas, and AdSense for content grew out of it.
Q 27What did Frederick Winslow Taylor call his approach to work efficiency?
Scientific management
Scientific management was derided by Lenin in 1914 as man's enslavement by the machine, yet in 1918 he urged Soviet Russia to study and teach the Taylor system.
Q 28Which 1970 statute governs hazards at work in the United States?
The Occupational Safety and Health Act
The Occupational Safety and Health Act came after years in which more than 14,000 US workers were killed on the job annually.
Q 29Which president signed that safety law?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon signed it on 29 December 1970; before that, federal protections for workplace safety were almost non-existent.
Q 30Which naturalist is credited with putting wheels on his study chair?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin put wheels on the chair in his study so he could get to his specimens more quickly.