Ask HN: Advice wanted – director distrusting of our team?

Hi -- I've posted before about a director of mine, who joined a few months ago. I'm trying to get a sense of how to interpret this situation, and what (if anything) there is to do for me here.

The director has a reasonably strong background in a specialty we're hiring for. We haven't put dedicated effort into this specialty, and only two of us (me and a staff-level teammate) have a background in this specialty. This specialty is a strong focus of the director, even to the point of excluding other very important areas of work.

We've been interviewing candidates, targeting those with this specialty. My interview is dedicated to assessing candidates' facility and depth with this specialty. I'm sensing what seems like some amount of distrust from the director about me and my team's capability to hire good candidates for this specialty.

In one case, my team did an interview loop with a candidate and decided to approve. The director wanted to meet with the candidate individually after the fact to assess whether they would indeed be a good fit, rather than as a "sales" call when an offer is extended.

In another case, the director second-guessed an internal candidate whom my manager and I fully supported joining the team; in this case, the director didn't interview the internal candidate, but had expressed skepticism about their suitability for the team, despite our strong support, and background (though not especially recent) in this specialty.

This is happening again in a third case -- a candidate passes the loop, but the director wants to meet to do at least some amount of assessment.

Is the director distrusting of the team (and hence of me in particular)? I've met with him a few times, and he's insistent about some pieces of work (prematurely, I think -- there's still a good amount of fact-finding to do before deciding on what, and when, to work on different options). I get the feeling he thinks our team isn't great at this, since it hasn't been urgent and prioritized before.

Are there interpretations I could be missing here? Could this be just a matter of style, that the director (~4 teams, ~30 reports, though growing) wants to be very hands-on with hiring, even ~mid-level candidates? If the director's doing any kind of assessment of the suitability of candidates after the loop, I'd have to assume the director would find it feasible to veto a candidate, even having a full loop approving.

If the director probably is distrusting, then besides delivering on this specialty myself, any ways I can earn the director's trust? I plan on delivering wins in this area myself, though I can't guarantee I can commit enough heads-down time to this; and my director and I so far haven't really seen eye to eye on approaches to tackling this.

Thoughts, comments, experiences welcome. Thanks.