Hibernate is not auto-creating a table that does not exist in the DB

I had the same issue, this worked for me -

<property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto">create</property>

The following scenario could be another reason why Hibernate cannot auto-create your table:

@Entity
public class Employee {
  @Id
  @GeneratedValue
  private String empID;
  private String name;
}   

The table Employee will not be auto-created by Hibernate since empID is a String and it has the @GeneratedValue annotation. empID should be an int or long. I had this problem sometime and I changed my id field that had the @GeneratedValue annotation to be of type int and Hibernate auto-created the table.