Steel has been mainly used in the automotive industry, because of good mechanical properties, weldability and so on. However, there has been increase in using aluminum to reduce the weight of vehicle. This leads to improve fuel efficiency and to reduce air pollution. A steel-aluminum hybrid body structure is recently used not only to reduce the weight of vehicle but also to increase safety. In this paper, the laser beam joining method is suggested to join steel and aluminum. To avoid making brittle intermetallic compounds(IMC) that reduce mechanical properties of the joint area, only aluminum is melted by laser irradiation and wetted on the steel surface. The brittle IMC layer is formed with small thickness at the interface between steel and aluminum. By controlling the process parameters, brittle IMC layer thickness is suppressed under 10 micrometers which is a criterion to maintain good mechanical properties.