[scottLobster]

Can you blame a company for prioritizing people who have worked in similar environments before?

In large corporations technical responsibility is often more distributed than in startups just due to size, so your technical skills, while important, are typically less important than they would be in small-business/startup land. What fills in the gap is communication skills and your ability to navigate corporate social networks. If you can't conflict resolve issues between engineering teams, well guess what? That engineering team you can't work with is going to hold you up and cost the company money while your superior, who really has better things to do, has to take time out of their day to address the issue you should have been able to handle.

Not saying it should be a mandatory skill, but you can't blame large corporations for filtering for it. It's a factor.