A lot of people have many foolish beliefs about professional life but chief among them is:

1) They think their hard work will get them recognized and they'll be ushered up the line (This is only true in a very small minority of companies).

2) They think senior leadership (directors and up) generally smart and infallible creatures that shouldn't be challenged (They must have been smart to get that high up right?).

3) They think honesty will take them places in the professional world (e.g. /u/SaggyBagz).

The reality is that to move up the line and promotion in title, you have to embellish and fluff your prior roles, responsibilities, and accomplishments. That colloquially means LIE. That simple $70k project you completed? No, it was a $700k complex project critical to the business that had you working cross-functionally to ensure a high level of success. You were a supervisor who supervised 1 person and checked his timesheet weekly? No, you coached, mentored, and trained a team of 5 with an operational budget of $1MM. These types of lies cannot be confirmed at all. All HR can do at your prior company is confirm tenure and title. That's it. Anything else is illegal and grounds for a lawsuit if they say anything else that potentially kills your job chances. References? A lot of companies don't even check them anymore because they have no way of confirming if the person they're calling was honestly an employee at the company you're claiming you knew them at. Do you see where I'm going with this? This is why SaggyBagz stays unemployed and why his competitors are getting the job.

There are a handful of unethical lifehacks that have been posted here before but one I have done myself in the past is posting fake job descriptions for fictitious recruiting companies to get my competitor's resumes to see what they're saying. I've caught one person so far doing this who ripped off a major chunk of my executive summary section of my resume and posted it as his own on his LinkedIn page. It was copied word, for fucking WORD. I can only ponder how many other people have done this. I've submitted my resume to thousands of places so I'm sure I sent one to a recruiting firm that was completely fictitious and wanted to mine good resume formatting and content.

Here's one great lifehack to move up: Always have your resume updated and always have it out there looking for a new role even if you aren't in the market. You may find yourself moving up to a senior manager role from your senior admin role because you just happen to be highly desirable at that moment in time. This is the real key of how people move up the line so quickly. Look for people on LinkedIn who job-jump every 2-3 years. They'll only stay at one spot for 3-4 years if they have stock options that require vesting before they up and leave elsewhere.