Why is #PrePersist is not being invoked in Hibernate 5.2? - spring

Question

I just recently moved from Hibernate4 to Hibernate5. I have implemented #PrePersist on my entity bean but #PrePersist doesn't seem to be firing up.
I have searched around
https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/wiki/Migration-Guide---5.2
And on it it states
org.hibernate.SessionFactory now extends javax.persistence.EntityManagerFactory - temporarily it technically extends org.hibernate.jpa.HibernateEntityManagerFactory (which in turn extends javax.persistence.EntityManagerFactory) for backwards compatibility. HibernateEntityManagerFactory is deprecated.
So this means JPA annotation should work right?
My entity class looks like this
#Entity
#Table(name="books")
#Component
public class Book implements Serializable{
private static final long serialVersionUID = -2042607611480064259L;
#Id
#GeneratedValue
private int id;
#NotBlank
private String name;
#NotBlank
#Size(min=2, max=16)
private String ispn;
#DecimalMin(value = "0.1")
private double price;
private Timestamp dateCreated;
private Date datePublished;
#PrePersist
public void beforePersist() {
System.out.println("#PrePersist is called");
this.dateCreated = Timestamp.from(Instant.now());
}
applicationContext.xml (Hibernate configuration)
<!-- Connection Pool -->
<bean id="hikariConfig" class="com.zaxxer.hikari.HikariConfig">
<property name="poolName" value="springHikariCP" />
<property name="connectionTestQuery" value="SELECT 1" />
<property name="dataSourceClassName"
value="com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlDataSource" />
<property name="dataSourceProperties">
<props>
<prop key="url">jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/sample</prop>
<prop key="user">sample</prop>
<prop key="password">sample</prop>
</props>
</property>
</bean>
<bean id="dataSource" class="com.zaxxer.hikari.HikariDataSource"
destroy-method="close">
<constructor-arg ref="hikariConfig" />
</bean>
<bean id="transactionManager"
class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate5.HibernateTransactionManager">
<property name="sessionFactory" ref="sessionFactory"></property>
</bean>
<!-- Hibernate Settings -->
<bean id="sessionFactory"
class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate5.LocalSessionFactoryBean">
<property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"></property>
<property name="hibernateProperties">
<props>
<prop key="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.id.new_generator_mappings">false</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.jdbc.time_zone">UTC</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.connection.useUnicode">true</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.connection.characterEncoding">UTF-8</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.connection.charSet">UTF-8</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.show_sql">true</prop>
<prop key="org.hibernate.jdbc">TRACE</prop>
</props>
</property>
<property name="packagesToScan">
<list>
<value>com.app.books</value>
</list>
</property>
</bean>
Questions
Something wrong with how I implement #Prepersist?
Or perhaps my Hibernate configuration has some error?
Thank you