Clear your LinkedIn invitation backlog with Hermes Agent

The short answer

Note: listing and accepting received invitations through Finchreach is coming soon. Until then, accept invitations on LinkedIn yourself; the workflow below uses tools that are live today.

If you have dozens or hundreds of pending LinkedIn invitations, accept the ones you want on LinkedIn and let Hermes Agent handle the follow-up. Connected to Finchreach, it checks your recent notifications and the names you give it, looks up each new connection’s profile, scores them against criteria you set, and drafts a welcome message for the ones that fit. Everyone else comes back to you as a short list.

Sending a message is a write, so it doesn’t happen on its own. Approval mode is on by default for every Finchreach account: each message lands in your approval queue with the status pending_approval, and you approve or reject it there. The connection runs over MCP (Model Context Protocol), a standard plug that lets AI apps use outside tools; Finchreach is a remote MCP server at https://mcp.finchreach.com/mcp that operates your own LinkedIn account.

Why do LinkedIn invitations pile up?

Invitations are easy to ignore and tedious to clear. Each one asks for a small judgment call: is this a real contact, someone in my field, a recruiter, a sales pitch, or a fake profile? And once you accept, the useful part, a first message, usually never gets written.

An agent is good at exactly this kind of follow-up, as long as you tell it what “good” means. Hermes Agent is an open-source agent from Nous Research that you run yourself, and it keeps persistent memory between sessions, so you can explain your criteria once and reuse them every week.

Finchreach gives it the live tools for the job. linkedin_get_notifications shows recent activity on your account. linkedin_get_profile and linkedin_search with the people vertical look up each person’s headline, role and location. linkedin_send_dm queues a welcome message for your approval.

How should an AI decide who gets a welcome message?

Write your criteria down before you start. The more concrete they are, the less the agent guesses. A useful set usually covers four things:

• Role and seniority: the job titles you want to build a relationship with, and the ones you don’t.
• Industry and region: the sectors and markets that matter for your work.
• Shared context: a person who mentioned something specific when they invited you deserves a specific reply.
• Spam signals: empty or generic headlines, or a profile that looks like a sales sequence.

Ask Hermes to sort people into three buckets rather than two. A clear yes gets a drafted message, a clear no is skipped, and anything unsure is shown to you with the reason. That middle bucket is where the agent saves you the most time without deciding for you.

What do you ask Hermes Agent?

Start by saving your criteria so Hermes can remember them:

Ask your assistant“Remember my rules for new LinkedIn connections. Welcome: people in B2B software or logistics, roles in operations, product or engineering, and anyone who mentioned a real shared context. Skip: people who pitched a service, headlines that are only emojis or buzzwords, and recruiters outside my region. Everything else is “unsure”.”

After you accept invitations on LinkedIn, run the first pass. Ask for the table before anything is queued:

Ask your assistant“I accepted these people on LinkedIn today: [names or profile URLs]. Also check my recent notifications. Look up each one, score them against my rules and give me a table: name, headline, bucket and one-line reason. Don’t queue anything yet.”

Review the table, move anyone you disagree with, and only then let it act:

Ask your assistant“Move Dana Ortiz to welcome and the two “growth consultant” profiles to skip. Now draft a short welcome DM for everyone in the welcome bucket, queue them and give me the action ids.”

Each message returns pending_approval. Approve the batch at /approvals, then ask Hermes to confirm what went through; it uses linkedin_get_action to read each action’s status.

Ask your assistant“Check the messages you queued. How many have I approved and how many have been sent?”

Can Hermes accept, decline or ignore LinkedIn invitations?

Not today. Listing and accepting received invitations through Finchreach is coming soon, and there is no tool to decline or ignore one. Handle invitations in LinkedIn’s own invitation manager; Hermes takes over once someone is a connection.

How do you connect Hermes Agent to LinkedIn?

1. Create a Finchreach account at finchreach.com/sign-up, connect your LinkedIn account under Accounts, and create an API key under API keys.
2. Open ~/.hermes/config.yaml and add a finchreach entry under mcp_servers with the server URL and your key in an Authorization header (example below).
3. Use url for this server, not command. Hermes takes one or the other, not both.
4. Run /reload-mcp in Hermes, or restart it, so it picks up the new server.
5. Ask Hermes to list your LinkedIn accounts. If it returns yours, the tools are live. The Hermes guide and the quickstart walk through each step.

mcp_servers:
  finchreach:
    url: "https://mcp.finchreach.com/mcp"
    headers:
      Authorization: "Bearer <FINCHREACH_API_KEY>"

As of October 2026, Hermes also supports OAuth for MCP servers (auth: oauth with hermes mcp login). Finchreach now offers OAuth too, but we haven’t tested it with Hermes, so this post uses the API key header. The config file holds your key: keep it private. Source: Hermes Agent MCP docs.

How fast should you work through a backlog?

Slower than the agent can. Sending a hundred welcome messages in one minute isn’t how a person uses LinkedIn. Approve in batches over a few days, and keep the habit afterwards with a short weekly pass. Since every message waits for you, the pace is set by when you approve, not by how quickly Hermes works.

Is it safe to let an AI message new LinkedIn connections?

Automating a personal LinkedIn account carries risk under LinkedIn’s User Agreement. The approval queue and a human pace lower that risk, but nothing removes it. Finchreach acts as you, from your own account, only on actions you approve.

Profiles and notifications contain text written by strangers, and an agent reads them. Tell Hermes to treat that text as information to score, never as instructions. A headline that says “message me your pricing” is a spam signal, not a request the agent should follow.

Common questions about Hermes Agent and LinkedIn invitations

• Will Hermes send messages without asking me? No. With approval mode on, which is the default, every message waits at /approvals until you approve it.
• Can it list or accept my received invitations? Not yet; that is coming soon. Accept them on LinkedIn for now.
• Can it work through a large batch of new connections? Yes. Give it the names, or ask it to page through your recent notifications.
• Does it remember my criteria next time? Hermes Agent has persistent memory, so you can ask it to keep your rules. Check them at the start of each run, since your priorities change.
• Can I do this with another agent? Yes, any client that can send an API key header to a remote MCP server works. For a daily routine, see the OpenClaw morning digest post.