After enabling the preemption parameters in yarn-site.xml as per link, it was found the applications are still waiting to run. This is because other queues are utilising all of the available resources. With Preemption enabled, under-served queues can begin to claim their allocated cluster resources almost immediately, without having to wait for other queues' applications to finish running.
Resolution:
Along with the below list of parameters to enable preemption, configure this parameter "yarn.resourcemanager.monitor.capacity.preemption.max_ignored_over_capacity" in yarn-site.xml, otherwise you won't see preemption though enabled. The doc is missing the above parameter.