Networking at Scale: Automating the “Reach Out to People” Advice

From Theory to Practice — A Selenium-Powered Experiment

In my last project (scroll down briefly), I explored who you should network with using Python’s networkx — treating professional relationships like a graph problem. It was a data-driven way to identify high-centrality individuals inside a corporate hierarchy.

But knowing who to connect with is only half the equation. The harder part? Actually reaching out to them — one message at a time.

And that’s where this new project comes in.

Automating Outreach (with a Human Touch)

I wrote a simple script using Selenium to automate the outreach process of sending a personalized connection requests.

It does all the basics:
Click the “Connect”
Insert a message
Click “Send”

But what makes this more than just a glorified spam-bot is the conditional logic baked into the messaging:

• If we have zero mutuals → keep it humble
• If we have a few mutuals → name-drop with grace
• If we have many mutuals → lean into the shared network

How?

The beautifulsoup package reads the number of shared mutual connections for the given user and determines which templated message to insert into the personalized messaging.

Ethics Disclaimer

No one wants to be that person flooding people with generic messages. And so this isn’t about mass-blasting strangers — it’s about scaling a outreach process to people you would have spent time connecting with anyway. Except it saves you some time from clicking around, copy and pasting and moving between tabs to see mutual connections.